Melissa Maples

Lucas rode his bike fast and hard, breaking traffic rules and running red lights when he thought he could get away with it.  He needed to get to his aunt's house before lunchtime, because in the afternoons she always left the house, always had hundreds of activities that she was involved with at any one time.  She had never married, had never even had a serious boyfriend as far as Lucas knew, and so she set about to fill her time in other ways.  Lucas knew that if he didn't catch her before lunch, she would be gone, and tomorrow would be too late.  He pumped the pedals harder, his thighs screaming in protest as he blazed through an intersection relying on luck alone to keep traffic out of his path.

Aunt Mary was his only aunt (his dad was an only child), and she was the black sheep of the family, or at least of that generation.  Karen's maiden name was Petrescu, but despite the eastern European heritage of both the Petrescus and the Ditryks, Lucas's family were no-nonsense people, generally speaking.  His parents never sent him to church, and they never talked about religion or the myths of their ancestors "back in the old country."  They weren't superstitious and they didn't care for anything supernatural.  All of Lucas's grandparents had the same disdain for what they called "gypsy poppycock".  In other words, his family were boring, one-dimensional people, or at least Lucas thought they were.  

But Aunt Mary was another story.  She openly believed in things and subscribed to practices that embarrassed the whole family.  She wasn't afraid to admit that she felt astrology held great influence over the universe, or that tarot cards could be useful tools for deciphering a tricky situation or making decisions in a crisis.  Her house was decorated with crystals and talismans, all of which had a special significance or had an impact, according to Aunt Mary, in a particular realm of the unseen.  Mary dressed in long, flowing velvet skirts and had wild, unruly hair.  She wore a lot of eyeliner and sometimes painted her nails purple or black.

The other members of the family seemed ashamed when Mary would bring her own inimitable style and flair to family gatherings and special occasions.  Karen referred to it as, "my sister's own brand of crazy," an assessment which most of the family shared but which Lucas thought was unfair.  Conversations always grew quiet around Mary, or sometimes people avoided her altogether if she started talking about subjects for which she had a particular passion, like ghosts she had seen, or star charts she had made for influential people.  Family members would cringe or turn away when those kinds of topics came up, which they invariably did at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but Lucas never saw what the big deal was.  He didn't have many aunts or uncles, in fact it was only Aunt Mary, and he always liked her, even as a kid.  He knew that his parents used to be worried that her eccentricities might frighten a small child, but that turned out to be a fear completely unfounded.  Lucas had loved visiting his aunt, and had particularly loved Mary's house, because her tables and shelves were full of all sorts of things that looked like trinkets from the fantasy books he loved so much, and Aunt Mary never said "don't touch that" or "leave those things alone" like his mother always did.  Nothing was off-limits in his Aunt Mary's house, and no matter what polished stone or gleaming crystal Lucas discovered, Mary always had a story about its origin that rivalled the legends in any Tolkien book

But now, far from the realm of childhood or the wonders of magical fables, Lucas needed his aunt's help in a way he could never have imagined.  Something had happened to him at the cellar door this morning, something profound and beyond his understanding, and Aunt Mary was the only person close to him who would possibly be able to help him unravel the mystery and figure out what he was supposed to do next.  He had a pretty good idea of what direction he would be heading, literally, but he had no way of knowing how he had come upon that information or why it had been given to him.  He had thousands of questions, but very few answers.

As he turned the corner onto his aunt's street, he exhaled with relief, both at the fact that her house was at the bottom of the hill and he could coast down from here, and at the sight of her car, still parked in the driveway.  Mary was eccentric in most ways, and her taste in vehicles was no exception.  Rather than spending her money on a newer car, she preferred to drive what she called "a classic."  Lucas wasn't sure just how far one would have to stretch to call a 1973 Pinto a classic, but Lucas liked the way she thought anyway.  She kept the car in exceptionally good condition, with a baby blue paint job and soft velour interior in grey.  It even had an eight-track cassette player, something Lucas might never had encountered in his life otherwise.  Spending time with Aunt Mary had certainly been educational, if nothing else.

Lucas left his bike in the driveway, behind the car, and jogged up to the front door.  He rang the bell several times, but for several minutes there was no answer.  He could hear some activity inside the house, something that sounded like singing, or maybe even chanting.  He started to wonder if he was interrupting something important that was going on in there.  He was just about to go around to the back of the house and try the kitchen door, when the front door cracked open and a round, chubby face appeared.

"Can I help you?" the woman asked, half smiling and half questioning.

Lucas didn't recognise her.  He could smell patchouli.  "I'm, uh, I guess I've come at a bad time.  I'm, I'm Lucas, Mary's nephew."

The woman opened the door all the way and her smile broadened.  "Oh yes, of course!" she said.  "Come in Lucas, it's not a bad time at all. Mary's told us so much about you, please join us.  Everyone will be thrilled to meet you."

Lucas wondered how many people comprised "everyone" as he smiled in embarrassment and made his way inside, being careful to remove his shoes and leave them in the front hall.  Aunt Mary had taught him that wearing shoes inside the house, especially when one was a guest, was impolite and disrespectful back in "the old country."  Lucas liked being barefoot anyway, so it was a rule that was easy to remember.

He could hear the chatter of women's voices as the chubby woman led him toward the dining room.  "We're just starting lunch, so you've arrived at a perfect time," she said.  "My name is Michaela, and I'll let the other ladies introduce themselves.  Ah, here we are," she said as they entered the dining room.  "Ladies, look who's here, it's Mary's nephew, Lucas!" she announced.  

There were seven ladies sitting at the table, with Aunt Mary at the head and an empty chair next to her where Michaela had been sitting.  Mary got up from her chair and walked with open arms toward her nephew.  "Lucas, what a lovely surprise," she said with complete sincerity, embracing him tightly and kissing him on the cheek.  "Michaela, would you mind bringing an extra chair in from the kitchen so we can make room for my handsome nephew?" she asked as Michaela nodded and disappeared into the other room.  She came back almost as quickly as she left, and the ladies moved aside to give Lucas a place to sit.  Before he had a chance to say anything, he had a plate in front of him that was heaped with food, and a fork in his hand.

"Eat, child, you're too thin," the woman to his left said.  He thought he had seen her before but couldn't recall her name.  In fact, he thought he recognised most of these women to varying degrees, but he couldn't quite remember from where or how long ago.  His hopes of being able to speak to his Aunt Mary in private were slowly sinking away as he saw the bottles of wine on the table and realised that these women were settling in for a long afternoon session.

"So, Lucas, what brings you to my neck of the woods this afternoon?" Mary asked, filling her glass with a vibrant red wine.  She held the bottle up toward Lucas with a questioning look on her face, as if to offer him some.  Well, this is something that would certainly never happen at home, he thought, and shook his head to decline the offer.  He'd never tasted any alcoholic drink before, and honestly he was a little afraid to try because most of them smelled terrible.  Mary passed the bottle around to Michaela and Lucas lost track of it after that.

"I just came to spend some time with you," Lucas lied.  Mary sighed histrionically and her face made an expression that told him she was smarter than that.  Give me a break, she said without words.  Lucas smiled at his aunt's ability to read people and he looked down at his plate in mock shame.  "Okay, okay," he admitted.  "I came because I need to speak to you about something."

Mary laughed.  "Let me guess," she said, "your father and mother have filled your head with more stories about how we practice voodoo and worship animal gods over at my house, and you've come to see if any of it's true."  The ladies giggled.

Lucas laughed as well.  His aunt was prone to melodrama, but her mention of voodoo and strange religion wasn't too far from what he'd heard in the past.  People tended to exaggerate things they didn't understand, and over the years Lucas's parents had been no exception.  The stories of Mary's alleged rituals and witchcraft ceremonies had reached nearly legendary status in his home.  Lucas had always suspected that most of it was untrue, and he'd been right.  Aunt Mary did not practice witchcraft as such, though she had great respect for those who did, and she fully believed in the power of the universe and natural forces.  Mary was just about the kindest person Lucas had ever met, and if she did practice any rituals, Lucas knew they would only be ceremonies that were based in respect for life and love for humanity.  There would certainly not be anything sacrificed or any voodoo going on.

"No, no, not this time Aunt Mary," Lucas replied.  An image of the cellar door passed through his mind and he suddenly became serious.  "No, I need to talk to you about something else, something that happened to me," he said solemnly.  "Something private.  Something I... can't explain."

A hush settled over the table and the ladies leaned forward in their chairs, filled with intrigue.

"Does your mother know you're here?" Mary asked.

"Yes, but she doesn't know why," Lucas replied.

Mary nodded.  "I see," she said.  "Michaela, get my nephew a glass of wine, would you please?"

Lucas didn't even try to refuse the wine this time.  He took a deep breath, and everyone at the table could see how troubled he was.  "Can we speak somewhere privately after lunch?" he asked.

Mary shrugged.  "Of course, if you wish," she said.  "But from what you've said so far, I suspect that the matter is not of a deeply personal nature, but rather deals with the unknown, am I right?"

Lucas nodded without saying anything.  He didn't even know where he was going to begin telling this tale.

Mary continued.  "Well then, you've come to the right place," she said, sweeping her arm out and gesturing toward the other women at the table.  "It's just your luck that we have a veritable expert panel of the unknown here.  Michaela's a professional at tarot and tea-leaf reading, Karla has a sensitivity for spirits trapped between the two worlds, Petra can unleash the natural powers in crystals and other objects, Selene can read signs of the past in houses and buildings... we have everything here, Lucas, and we're more than happy to help.  Now relax and drink your wine, and tell us what happened."

Lucas stared at his wine, not quite sure how to go about drinking it, and then he wrapped his hand around the stem of the glass.  He looked around at the approving smiles from the ladies and raised the glass to his lips.  The wine was sweeter than he expected, very sweet in fact, and the taste of it warmed and calmed him.  After another two or three sips he decided he must find out what the name of this wine was.  He took a long, slow breath, placed his glass on the table, and began his story.

The women listened intently, and despite Lucas's fears not one of them laughed at him or ridiculed what he was saying.  He made his best effort to speak slowly and clearly, trying not to forget anything, and going back and correcting himself when he did forget to include an important detail here or there.  Occasionally one of the women would stop him to ask a question, usually just a point of clarification, and he found that their questions helped propel him along in his tale.  All in all, they were more receptive than he could have ever hoped for, and Lucas felt a great weight lift from him when he finished his story.  None of them asked him if he had been taking drugs, and none of them patronised him by saying it was probably a dream and that he should just forget about it.  They were attentive and receptive, and Lucas was discovering a new level of respect for his aunt and her circle of friends.

Karla was the first to speak.  "Lucas, you say the voice you heard speaking to you was a woman, is that correct?"

Lucas nodded.

"And she told you that you must go to the woman you saw in the vision?"

"Yes," Lucas replied.  "At least, I think so.  She told me that I must go, and I had a strong feeling that I'm supposed to find the woman I saw lying on that floor.  She told me that the woman was waiting for me."

The women murmured among themselves for a minute, and then Karla spoke again.  "Lucas, do you feel you want to go find this woman?"

Lucas sighed.  "I don't think it's about what I want," he said.  "I'm pretty sure I have to go, that's it's what's required of me."

Karla smiled.  She looked around at the other women, who all nodded in assent.  "Then if you have to go, you have to," she said.  "We humans like to think we're the bosses of the world, but not everything is always up to us."

Lucas quickly looked to his Aunt Mary for her opinion.  Mary shrugged and said, "it's true, Lucas.  I have no idea how we're going to explain this to your parents, but clearly this is your path, a path that fate has chosen for you.  Who are we to question that?  I think the consequences of you not going are likely to be greater than those we'll face for stretching the truth to Karen and Bill.  They are, after all, just people, and if you're answering to something higher now, then they don't really have much authority over that."

Lucas sat glued to his chair, stunned that his aunt had spoken out so boldly against the rule of his parents, that the whole issue had been dealt with so decisively and quickly, and that they had wound up at such a bizarre conclusion.  Was it really just as simple as following a voice he heard in his head?  What if he was wrong, what if it was schizophrenia or some other type of psychosis?  What if there really was no woman and it was all in his head?  The ladies didn't seem to think there was much to get worked up about— after the satisfaction of having delivered such a cut-and-dried verdict, they simply got up from the table and cleared the dishes away.  After the remains of the lunch were taken to the kitchen, a couple of the women stayed in there to wash up while everyone else shuffled themselves and the rest of the wine into the living room.  As he lovingly escorted his second glass of wine out of the dining room, Lucas made his way over to his favourite chair in the living room, the one he always used to choose when he was a child visiting Aunt Mary's house.  It was overstuffed, soft, and comfortable, and it was the closest one to the fireplace, which wasn't quite in use yet this early in the season.

After Lucas had listened to a few minutes of idle chit-chat, one of the women came out of the kitchen with a large platter of freshly baked cookies, and Lucas instantly reverted to his childhood.  He took three of the cookies, which were chocolate-chocolate-chip, and the wine helped him forget that the perfect accompaniment to cookies was actually a big glass of cold milk.  As the women emerged from the kitchen and the dining room one by one, they each settled down on the sofa and amongst the ample choice of chairs in Aunt Mary's living room.  Mary's house was huge, but it still had a very cosy feel about it, especially when it was full of such warm personalities.  Lucas was having a fantastic time, and the wine helped him ignore how strange it was that he was a teenager spending his Saturday afternoon with a group of middle-aged women who lived on the fringe of what was considered to be normal society.  But the truth was that he couldn't think of anywhere else he would have rather been at that moment.

"So, Lucas, where is it you're supposed to go to find this woman?" one of the women asked.  Lucas thought he remembered that her name was Ellen.

"Um, I'm not too sure," he replied.  "The voice wasn't specific about that, but..."

"...But you must have some idea?" Ellen asked.

"Well, kind of... I think I'm headed east."

Ellen nodded and took another sip of her third glass of wine.  "East," she repeated.

"You mean, like Boston?" Karla asked.

Lucas thought that was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, but then he remembered that he was the one with the ridiculous story, and he couldn't expect others to automatically know things about it, or feel the intuition about it that he did.  In the end, although these people were extremely sympathetic to his cause and very open-minded about what appeared to be a supernatural incident, the fact remained that they weren't there when the cellar vision happened.  They had no way of knowing how strong the pull of this voice had been, and they couldn't feel the magnitude of the pull that Lucas felt, the magnet-like force he couldn't describe with mere words.

"No, not Boston, more like... more east," he said, the wine now beginning to interfere with his ability to explain himself clearly.

Mary's face started to show concern.  "What, like, overseas?"  she asked, and only now did she allow the briefest hint of incredulity creep into her voice.  How odd, Lucas thought, that she has no problem accepting the idea that a disembodied voice may have visited me in a ghost-like visual encounter in my downstairs hallway this morning, but the thought of my going across an ocean is just too much for her to handle.

"Yeah, I think so," he finally said, shrugging as if he weren't completely certain.  But in his mind he was sure he would be travelling much further than just overseas, though his exact destination was still unknown to him.

Mary's face dropped into a pained expression, somewhere between disappointment and regret.  "Lucas, I'm not sure how we could possibly explain something of that magnitude to your parents," she said.  "I mean, if you were travelling within the United States I could probably find some way to justify it to them, or I could cover for you somehow, but international travel, Lucas, and with you still being a minor and all, I just—"

"Mary, like we all agreed before, if he has to go, then it's not up to him or anyone else to question it," Ellen interrupted.  "You should know better than anyone that that's not how destiny works.  It's not like you can tell it no if you don't like the place it's sending you to or you think the journey will be too difficult."

"But Ellen, he's my nephew.  If anything were to happen to him, of course I'd be accepting the responsibility for that, and I just couldn't live with myself if anything happened to Lucas because of my irresponsibility, much less having to explain it to my sister and—"

"So come with me," Lucas said.

Al the women stopped, some mid-sip, and turned to look at Lucas.  Mary looked confused.  "Excuse me, what did you just say?" she asked.

"Come with me," Lucas repeated.  "We'll go together.  You can help me point myself in the right direction, and I'll personally escort you to your very own vacation in the old country."  The women gasped in a mixed expression of shock and delight.  "Come on, I know you've been wanting to see eastern Europe since you were a little girl, so now is your chance.  You'd be safe with me, and I'd be safe with you.  We could help each other."

Mary opened and closed her mouth a few times, but no words came out.  "You know, Mary, the boy has a point," Michaela said.  "Going to the old country is all you've ever talked about for years now, and you've always said that the main thing that kept you from going was that you were a single female travelling alone.  So now you have an opportunity to go there with a handsome young man by your side, one who is on a mission assigned to him by the universe itself.  How much more of a fairy tale do you want?"

Mary looked at Lucas, and Lucas flashed what he thought must be the most charming smile ever, though now it was stained with red wine.  He raised his eyebrows at his aunt.  "What do you say, Aunt Mary?" he asked.  "We can see the world together, I can do whatever it is I'm supposed to do, and maybe along the way we'll even learn what the deal is with all those crazy cats gathering around the house.  I'm sure there's a reason for it."

Lucas took a big gulp of his wine as Mary shot a confused look at Michaela.  Cats? she mouthed, as Michaela shrugged.  The other women also looked at Mary and indicated with their expressions that they had no clue what her nephew was talking about.  Perhaps he'd had a little too much wine, some of them thought.

Lucas looked up from his glass and saw the bemusement on their faces.  "Oh," he said nonchalantly, swirling the wine around in his glass.  "Didn't I tell you about the cats?"

Terra sat on the sofa and wondered for the thousandth time where her missing time had gone.  It sounded ridiculous to even think of it that way, but no matter how you looked at it there were ten days of her life she couldn't account for, time that had just vanished from her memory.  But it was more than that, it was more than just a lapse of memory.  Things didn't make sense, pieces didn't fit together.  Mehmet seemed to think it was a simple case of temporary amnesia, but Terra knew it wasn't so easy to explain.  Amnesia was one of those things that you saw a lot in the movies, but it almost never happened in real life.  She'd read a lot about it on the internet over the past few days, and doctors all over the world seemed to agree on that point.  Mehmet had wanted Terra to see a doctor anyway, but Terra thought it was unnecessary and refused to go.

Mehmet's next suggestion had been that there had been some weird hypnosis going on at the retreat and that she'd been a victim of mind control.  Terra certainly didn't discount that possibility— she definitely thought something was wrong with those people, and definitely suspected that something was amiss with the situation in general.  But she still didn't think she could have lost ten entire days due to hypnosis alone.  She'd read up about hypnotic suggestion as well, and from what she could tell it wasn't as straightforward as just putting someone in a trance and then ordering them to forget ten days of their life.  It didn't work like that.

So Mehmet in his frustration had asked Terra if she had any better ideas as to what happened to her and why she had come back from the missing retreat so profoundly changed.  Since she had returned home Terra had been a different person— distant and cold, sometimes nervous, sometimes unresponsive.  Mehmet was worried that something was seriously wrong, something that required the help of a doctor.  Terra scoffed at that, but her other suggestions were so outlandish that she dared not even mention them to Mehmet.  Maybe the old man did something to my brain, or maybe Rose did, she thought.  Neither of those ideas made any sense, but it was better than thinking she'd just lost time for no reason.  Rose and the old man seemed like distant memories now, and sometimes Terra wondered if they'd ever been real in the first place.

It had been over three weeks since Terra had originally gone away to the retreat, but it seemed like only half that time to her because ten of those days had seemingly vanished into thin air.  It was now early November, and the weather even here on the south coast was starting to turn grey and chilly.  Terra spent a lot of her time these days sitting right here on the sofa, staring out at the apartment buildings and the mountains.  I guess it doesn't matter that I lost all that time if this is how I choose to spend it, she thought.  She seemed full of self-loathing recently, and she certainly felt depressed.

Terra heard the front door open and close, and Mehmet came into the room, all cheerfulness and smiles.  He handed Terra the newspaper she'd asked for, and in his other hand he had a bag full of things he'd picked up at the bakery for breakfast.  "I thought we'd have breakfast on the sofa this morning," he said, "since it's the weekend and, well, you seem inclined to stay on the sofa all day anyway."

Terra rolled her eyes at his sarcasm and unfolded the paper.  She couldn't even be bothered to form a response, especially since Mehmet was right.  She stared at the date on the top of the front page.  November already, she thought, and skimmed down today's top stories.  War over there.  Scandal over here.  Natural disaster on the other side of the world.  Wherever you looked, things were a mess.  Terra sighed and put the paper down.  "You think we should have coffee?" she asked.  Mehmet grunted from behind his own newspaper.  "Well, I'm going to have coffee," she answered herself.  "I'll make you some, too."

The house had become kind of a mess over the past couple of weeks, what with Mehmet so busy all the time and Terra feeling apathetic about daily domestic things.  When Terra got to the kitchen she had to shove some dishes aside on the counter to make way for two coffee cups, which she had to wash by hand because the cupboard was empty and all the cups were in the sink.  As she waited for the water to boil, she stared at the mess around her and then out the window.  I've got to pull myself out of this, she thought.  I can't go on dwelling on it forever.

She paced slowly around the kitchen for a few minutes and then found herself in front of the sink.  She couldn't see the bottom of it for all the dishes piled up in there.  With a sigh, she picked up the sponge and the dishwashing liquid.  Baby steps, she thought, and resolved to clean a couple of the plates before the coffee water started boiling.

As she scrubbed the crusted food off one of the plates, Terra noticed something odd on the counter, mixed in amongst the dishes. "What on earth is that doing there?" she mumbled as she put the sponge down and rinsed her hands.  At first she thought she was mistaken, but when she moved the dishes aside, there it was— the key she'd discovered in her hotel room at the retreat.  As soon as she saw it she remembered having put it there.  She hadn't left it there on purpose, she'd just placed it on the counter temporarily, and as the dishes overwhelmed the kitchen the key got lost underneath.  It really is a nice-looking old key, she thought, and picked it up and examined it.  I must do something creative with it before I lose track of it again.  Maybe I can clean it up and tie it with some ribbon and make a Christmas ornament out of it.  

Just as Terra decided this might be the perfect project to pull her out of her slump, she heard the whistle of the coffee water boiling.  She turned the gas off with her free hand and then reached out to retrieve the kettle.  The warmth of it was inviting, but as her fingers wrapped around the handle, her muscles froze up and for a moment she became paralysed.  Her heart raced and her breathing quickened.  Was she having a seizure?  The kettle in her hand bounced around as she lost control of her motor functions.  Her legs were immobile, gluing her to her spot on the kitchen floor, and her upper body was trembling in small, jerking movements.  Small splashes of boiling water escaped from the spout of the kettle and flew around her.  The key in her other hand began to feel warm.  In fact, there was a tingling sensation there, like the key was trying to burn through her hand.  Terra opened her mouth and tried to call for Mehmet, but no sound escaped her lips.  She tried to pry her fingers away from the key, but whatever was holding her hand around it was much stronger than she was.  She hoped that her other hand would continue holding on to the kettle and that she wouldn't spill boiling water all over herself.

Terra closed her eyes to try to calm herself, and then in that darkness a sudden flash took over her attention.  A picture formed in her mind, too close-up and fuzzy at first to see what it was, but slowly the image pulled away and became more and more focused.  It was an image of a key, the same key she had in her hand, and it was being turned in the lock of a wooden door.  As the image expanded, she saw that the hand turning the key belonged to a man trying to open the door, an athletic-looking man with sandy blond hair.  But he looked young, even from the back— perhaps he was still a teenager.  There was a cat scratching at the door, a fluffy white cat.  Terra concentrated on the cat for a moment, and then somehow realised that he was not scratching to have the door opened, but rather he was reaching up the door trying to draw the man's attention to the key.  Terra could hear someone breathing.  Perhaps it's my own breath, she thought, but then the breath circled around her, inside her head, and formed itself into a voice.  The voice sounded familiar, like a combination of every voice she had ever heard, and its presence was so demanding she couldn't imagine ever having paid attention to anything else.  It chanted something she didn't understand in low, moaning tones, and then the syllables started to gather in her mind as the image she was seeing began to zoom in on the back of the man's head.

He will find you, the voice said as the man in the image slowly turned his head around to profile, and you must be ready to meet him.  Terra got the feeling that the voice was benevolent, that it was trying to comfort and reassure her.  But this was all too much, too intense for her to handle.  Even from the side view, Terra could see that the man looked like he could have been her brother.  The resemblance was difficult to accept.  Terra was an only child.

The man in the image opened the door and disappeared into some unknown darkness.  The voice melted back into chanting and the image started to spin, slowly accelerating around her in circles until Terra lost her balance and fell to the kitchen floor, both kettle and key clanging on the tiles as she released her grip on them.

"Cat, I'm serious, you are going to get stepped on and then you're going to cry about it," Lucas said as he walked over to the sink and placed his empty pancake plate into it.  Casper was meowing and frantically circling Lucas's feet, which Lucas assumed had something to do with the cats out on the front lawn.  "You're not going out to play, and that's the end of that," Lucas said.  Cats were very sensitive to seasonal change, and Lucas assumed this sudden cold snap was making them all go a little crazy.

As Lucas rounded the corner toward the staircase, his mother, who was still clearing the table from breakfast, shouted, "darling, if you're passing by the cellar, could you pop down and bring some chicken up from the freezer for tonight?  I should get it defrosting as soon as possible."  Lucas wasn't particularly passing by the cellar, but he enjoyed helping his mother, and since he was feeling content after such a wonderful breakfast and today was apparently Saturday again, he had nowhere more important to go.

He passed the staircase with Casper nearly tripping him at every step, and kept walking to the end of the hall where the entrance to the cellar was.  The key was already in the lock, where they always kept it.  There was no particular need to keep the cellar secure, but the door was old and the wood had shrunken away from the frame somewhat, and thus the door had a bad habit of swinging open on its own when the weather was cold.  This allowed Casper access to the cellar, and also allowed winter air access to the house.  Neither was a good idea, though Casper seemed to think being in the cellar was a fantastic adventure.  The first time he'd managed to sneak his way down there he was gone for three days, and when they finally found him he was filthy and hungry and covered in cobwebs.  After that it became his mission in life to get back down there whenever possible, of course, and it was Lucas's job to make sure he didn't.

"Oh no you don't, I know what your game is," Lucas said as he got to the cellar door and Casper started scratching at it.  The cat stretched himself up the door, making himself as tall as he could and reaching up toward the lock and the doorknob.  Lucas laughed out loud and shouted to his mother, "Mom, Casper's actually trying to open the cellar door on his own!"  Casper meowed insistently, pushing his paws up the door and staring at the key in the lock.

Lucas paused for a moment, squinted, and cocked his head.  He thought he could hear those other cats outside meowing, as well.  He listened intently, trying to distinguish between the sounds outside and Casper's incessant whining.  No, that's probably just the wind howling through the trees, he finally decided, and tried to shake a growing sense of unease out of his head.  He turned the key to the cellar door, and suddenly he found himself holding the key as the door flew away from him and banged against the wall of the cellar.

Lucas stared open-mouthed at the key in his hand and noticed that it felt warm and seemed to vibrate with some kind of energy.  Casper was going crazy, meowing and stretching himself up Lucas's legs as if getting to the key was the most important thing in the world.  Out of the corner of his eye Lucas saw some movement coming from the cellar, but when he looked up the cellar was gone, replaced with something that looked like a movie but that he knew must be in his own head.  Casper's pleas faded into the background until Lucas was no longer aware of anything but the silent film playing in front of him.

What he was watching appeared to be a woman who might have been a younger version of his mother.  Lucas noticed that the woman looked a lot like him, which he could tell even though in this film she was lying on a floor, apparently unconscious.  Next to her head on the floor was, impossibly, the key to his own cellar door.  The room she was lying in appeared to be a kitchen, though it wasn't the kitchen at any house Lucas had ever lived in, and there had clearly been an accident of some kind.

Suddenly a dark-haired man hurriedly entered the kitchen in the movie, and crouched over the woman's body.  Lucas thought the man was trying to help her, but he never found out for sure.  Suddenly the picture in the film started to flicker and pulsate, and the voice of a young woman penetrated Lucas's head.  She is waiting, the woman's voice said.  You must go.

The picture in the film first blurred and then exploded into shards of light that nearly blinded Lucas.  The key burned in his hand, and its vibrations increased.  Plans started forming in Lucas's head, not coming from his own thoughts but from some external source forcing its will on him.  The stairs down to the cellar slowly came back into focus, and suddenly Lucas knew what he had to do.

Casper chose this moment to streak past Lucas down the cellar staircase.  "Damn it," Lucas whispered, but what he was more concerned about was the face of the woman he'd seen in the film, a woman who looked so much like him he wondered if his mother had another sister she'd never told him about.  In a daze, Lucas slowly descended the stairs to get the chicken from the freezer, but in his mind he was already thinking about the journey he was going to have to make.

"Seriously, I swear I don't need to see a doctor, please quit fussing," Terra said.  

Mehmet had nearly panicked when he heard the crash of the kettle and had run into the kitchen to find Terra unconscious on the floor.  He had tried to wake her for several minutes, and was starting to call an ambulance when Terra finally came to and asked what he was doing, and why she was wet.  Mehmet was so thankful that she was awake and talking, he had tossed his phone on the counter and crouched down to speak to her, to see if she was ok. 

"My hand hurts," she had said, flexing and releasing her fist and noticing that her palm was red and sore.

"You probably burned yourself on the kettle," Mehmet had told her.

Now, half an hour later, Terra was sitting on the sofa again, this time wrapped in her bathrobe.  Mehmet had cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and had finally brought her the coffee she'd been trying to make.  As she sipped the hot drink and tried to remember what happened, Mehmet kept pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, cleaning things up for a few minutes and then coming back and trying to talk Terra into seeing a doctor.  But Terra was feeling fine now, if a little confused.  She was recalling the remnants of a strange dream she'd had while she was unconscious on the kitchen floor, something about a man, and a big house cat, and a... door?  No, not the door itself, but rather—

"What's this?" Mehmet asked.  He had just come back from the kitchen, and in his hand he was holding up a key.  "I found it on the floor in the kitchen, do you have any idea what it's for?"

The colour drained from Terra's face as the pieces of her scattered memory suddenly wove themselves together.  She remembered everything now, everything from the weird muscle paralysis straight through to the vision of the young man's face, a face that could have been her own twin in another life.  "I, um, yeah, it's an old key I found when I was on retreat, I was going to make a Christmas ornament out of it," she replied.  She glanced down at her hand, throbbing with heat and soreness and now an angry deep pink colour.  She could hear the echoes of that strange voice in her head.  He will find you, it had said.  Terra was not afraid, and in fact she felt comforted.

"Well, it's a nice old key, that's for sure," Mehmet said, and tossed it onto the sofa beside Terra.  She was a little nervous to pick it up, but somehow she sensed that now it was just a key, nothing special or powerful about it, and her suspicions were confirmed as she gingerly scooped it up from the sofa cushion and slipped it in the pocket of her bathrobe.  She felt a certain energy there, something emanating from the key that reminded her of its nature, but nothing about it felt upsetting or disruptive.  This young man was coming to find her, and that was just the way it was supposed to be.  The situation had no quality of goodness or evil about it, and she made no judgement of it.  I wonder if I'm supposed to get the spare bedroom ready, she thought, smiling to herself.  Her smile faded, though, as a second thought popped into her head: how on earth am I going to explain this to Mehmet?  He knows I don't have a brother.

Lucas wandered back into the kitchen with a frozen chicken tucked under his arm.  He dropped it in the sink without looking down and kept walking, over to the windows that faced the backyard.  He stared out across the lawn for several minutes, feeling pleasantly overwhelmed and anxious all at once.  He could hear a voice somewhere in the background of his awareness, a woman's voice that became more and more insistent, until it finally broke through the barrier of his thoughts.

"Lucas!" his mother yelled.  "Are you listening?"

He turned around and saw his mother standing at the kitchen counter, the red in her cheeks sharply punctuating her expression of deep annoyance.  "Sorry Mom," he replied.  "Did you say something?"

"I was just wondering if there was some reason you left the cellar door open and then walked through here like a zombie and dropped the chicken into the soapy dishwater as if it were a cannonball," Karen said.  "Now there's soap suds and water all over the floor, and my guess would be that Casper is exploring the dirtiest, filthiest corners of the basement as we speak."

Lucas barely heard her, and he slowly turned back toward the windows.  "Casper's not down there," he mumbled.  He started to say something else, but his thoughts trailed off.

Karen tried to control her anger, but she at least expected her son to look at her when they were having a conversation.  "And how do you know he's not down there?" she asked, walking over toward the windows to see what had Lucas so mesmerised.

"Because he's outside," Lucas replied without emotion, his voice even and steady.

Karen stopped walking and furrowed her brow.  "Outside?" she asked in a shrill voice.  "That's impossible.  I mean, even if he did manage to get down in the basement, which is likely given the fact that you carelessly left the door open, there's no way out of there except to come back up the stairs into the—"

Lucas interrupted her, not with his voice, but by placing his index finger against the glass, pointing out the window to draw her attention to the backyard.  Karen stopped talking and looked where her son was pointing.  At first she didn't see anything, only the carpet of unraked leaves covering the yard and the rusted swing set that had been neglected ever since Lucas became too old to use it.  But then there was a flicker of movement at the side of her vision, and Karen craned her neck and turned her head to the left to see one of the neighbourhood cats, an old tabby tom, making his way around from the side of the house into the backyard.  He was followed by three other cats, and one of them was even white, but none of them was Casper.  

Karen squinted at the oddness of what was happening, and then she detected some more movement from the other direction.  She turned to the right and saw five or six more cats emerging from around that corner of the house, again following each other in something approximating single file.  Karen inhaled sharply as she noticed a cat in the middle of the group that looked suspiciously like Casper.  The two groups of cats walked toward each other until they finally met in the middle of the yard, right in front of where Lucas and his mother were standing.  The cats sat down about twenty feet from the house, all of them facing the windows and staring at Lucas.  He stared back, and Karen looked at her son with her mouth open, unsure what to say.

It was Lucas who broke the silence.  "Mom, do you have another sister besides Aunt Mary?" he asked.

Karen recoiled, wondering what this line of questioning had to do with anything and where Lucas had come up with such a ridiculous idea.  She decided to resist her urge to respond with another question, for the time being.  "No, of course not," she replied, wondering several things at once— why her son had suddenly turned into something resembling a zombie, how Casper had managed to join the neighbourhood cats and why they were behaving in such a strange way, and what her sister had to do with any of it.

"Actually,  I think I need to speak to Aunt Mary," Lucas mumbled after a long pause.  He nodded his head as his thoughts picked up speed and he started formulating a plan.  "Yeah, Aunt Mary will help," he said, and ran past his mother, through the house, and out the front door.  Karen heard the door slamming before she even got a chance to think about inquiring into what was going on.  When her delayed reaction finally prompted her to do something, she ran over to the front door and yanked it open, just it time to see Lucas on his bicycle, disappearing over the top of the hill at the end of their street.

Shut up, Casper.

Lucas Ditryk turned over in bed and groaned.  The sun was already pushing its way over the houses of the Chicago suburbs and through his bedroom blinds, and as usual it was unrelenting in its insistence that the day should proceed as normal.  Casper, too, seemed intent on getting the morning started.  He meowed for the tenth time and finally launched himself up onto the bed, paws prodding into Lucas's ribs.  Lucas sighed, half amused and half annoyed.  He wanted to go back to sleep, but he could never seem to resist Casper when the cat demanded attention.  Lucas rolled onto his back and scratched Casper between the ears.  Casper squinted and purred and settled onto Lucas's chest.

Everyone always commented on what a giant cat Casper was, but his size was mostly due to excessive amounts of fluff, long snow-white fur that required a tremendous deal of care and brushing to keep it from becoming tangled and matted.  When they first saw Casper at the shelter, Lucas's parents had tried to talk him into a more sensible choice.  Perhaps he'd prefer a short-haired cat, or even better, a puppy.  Casper was an adult cat even then— the shelter didn't know exactly how old, as he'd been a stray, but they thought he might be three or four.  They didn't know anything about the cat's history, and Lucas's parents were worried that an adult cat might come with behavioural problems.  They didn't want an animal that was going to destroy their house or pee all over the furniture.  But Lucas had been twelve at the time, a very persuasive age.  He insisted that Casper was the only animal he wanted, and that he was up to the task of brushing, feeding, and taking care of Casper.  The shelter had called him Fluffy, but Lucas thought Fluffy was a girl's name.  He'd already chosen the name Casper before his parents even agreed to the adoption, and after than there was no swaying him.  They had formed a bond that couldn't be broken.  Eventually Karen and Bill gave in, and they, too, grew to love Casper over time.  Occasionally Casper would cough up a fur ball onto the carpet and Bill would grumble about wishing they'd got a dog instead, but in secret he liked Casper just as much as everyone else did.

Lucas stayed in bed a few more minutes and reflected on how Casper had been his best friend in the world during the past five years.  He had kept his promise of taking care of Casper, had done all the grooming and taken care of arranging all the vet visits.  He'd wrestled Casper to the ground and given him tablets when the vet prescribed them, and he'd even spent extra money out of his allowance every week so Casper could have the expensive food the vet recommended.  The cat was spoiled rotten.

Lucas's parents weren't sure how healthy this close relationship with the cat was.  Lucas was seventeen now, and they felt he was of the age where he should certainly be interested in girls more than pets.  He did have one girlfriend for a short time during the previous school year, but that had come to a sudden halt when she came over for dinner one evening and it turned out she was allergic to cats.  Karen and Bill had seen the look of horror on Lucas's face.  The girl never came to the house again, and Lucas never mentioned her after that.  Since that disaster, Lucas's new method of sizing up potential dates was to ask them right from the start if they had any cat-related issues.  So far none of the girls he approached had ended up going out with him.  He didn't care.

But Lucas was not socially inept; far from it.  He played sports, track and field in particular, and he had a lot of friends both on the track team and in the sports that he participated in outside of school.  And he was training for a marathon, which meant there was a whole other set of friends that went along with that.  Lucas was well-respected and liked by his peers, but he wasn't particularly what you'd call popular.  He was happy, though, and he had great plans for his future.

Lucas snapped out of his daydream as Casper's body suddenly went rigid, his eyes focused unwaveringly on Lucas.  Lucas continued to pet the cat, but clearly something had come to Casper's attention.  Lucas raised his head off the pillow and looked behind him, in the general direction that Casper was facing.  There was nothing back there of any interesting, nothing moving, not even any sunlight on the wall.

"You're crazy, cat," Lucas said as he lifted Casper up and placed him gently on the floor.  Lucas sat up and swung his legs around to the floor.  He glanced at the clock on the wall.  7:35.  He needed to hurry and get ready or he was going to be late for school.  Lucas wondered vaguely why his mother hadn't come in to wake him earlier.  She was usually pretty diligent about things like punctuality, and although there was nothing special going on before school this particular morning, no running practice or anything like that, Karen rarely ever let Lucas sleep in past 7:00 on a school day.  Maybe she's not feeling well, maybe she slept in herself, he thought, and raised himself to his feet.  Karen was prone to migraines and Lucas wondered if she'd stayed in bed this morning.

Casper followed right up against Lucas's heels as Lucas grabbed his towel and headed toward the bathroom.  "Casper, what is wrong with you this morning?" Lucas asked.  "If you're not careful you're going to get stepped on, and that'll end in tears for everyone," he added.  Casper paid no attention, he stayed close to Lucas and even followed Lucas into the bathroom.  "You're not going to like it in here, I'm going to turn the water on," he warned Casper.  Casper jumped up onto the bathroom counter and meowed, his eyes still looking directly into Lucas's.  "Well, suit yourself," Lucas said as he closed the bathroom door and pulled the shower curtain aside.  "But once I get in the shower, I'm not coming out to open the bathroom door for you.  You'll just have to deal."

Casper continued to stare.  He didn't move.

As Lucas got in the shower and washed his hair, he fully expected Casper to start complaining.  The cat didn't like to be locked in anywhere, and he especially didn't like any place where he might accidentally get wet.  There had been a couple of ill-fated attempts to give Casper a bath back when he first came to live with them, but after a trip to the emergency room to stitch up a deep cut on Lucas's arm where Casper had scratched him, they gave up on trying to bathe him at home and started sending him to a professional groomer instead.  Since that time, Casper had avoided the bathroom at all costs.

But this morning was different.  Lucas rinsed the shampoo out of his hair and pulled the shower curtain back just enough so he could peek out into the bathroom.  There was Casper, on the floor now, nearly pressed up against the bathtub and staring straight up at Lucas.  "I don't get it, is something wrong?" he asked Casper.  The cat meowed gently, but didn't budge.  Lucas shrugged.  "Sometimes I wonder about you," he said, and pushed the shower curtain back against the wall.

After finishing his shower and getting dressed, Lucas wandered into the kitchen to find his mother sitting at the kitchen counter, drinking her coffee and reading the newspaper.  The radio played softly in the background.  She looked like she was enjoying herself and didn't have a care in the world.  Lucas looked down to see Casper sitting at his feet and looking up at him from the ground.  His cat was clearly nuts and his mother had forgotten to get him out of bed.  He wondered if the whole world had gone crazy this morning.

"Mom, why didn't you wake me up?"  He asked. 

Karen was engrossed in her paper and she didn't even raise her eyes— she simply muttered a vague "hmmm?" and kept reading.

"Hello, Mom?  Earth to Mom," Lucas said, letting the irritation show in his voice.

Karen suddenly snapped her head around toward Lucas. "Oh, I'm sorry darling," she said.  "I was just caught up in reading, I didn't mean to ignore you.  Was there something you needed?  Should we have pancakes for breakfast this morning, do you think?  I was thinking pancakes and sausage.  Your father's already gone out to play golf, he left a couple of hours ago, so it's just you and me."

Lucas was frustrated that his mother didn't seem to have any sense of urgency this morning.  "Mom, why didn't you wake me up earlier?" he asked.  "It's nearly 8:00 now."

Karen furrowed her brow and shrugged.  "I don't know, I guess I just thought you might like to sleep in today, since you're always up at the crack of dawn, going for a run or whatever.  I mean, what's the problem if you just take one morning out of the year to relax a little?  I think you work too hard anyway."

"But Mom, today's not the best time to sleep in, because I'm going to be late for school," Lucas replied.

Karen blinked a couple of times and then giggled.  "Darling, it's Saturday," she said, a warm smile spreading across her face.

Yes, the whole world is definitely crazy today, Lucas thought.  "No mom, it's Wednesday," he corrected her.  "Last night was the track meet, remember?  Track meets are always on a Tuesday.  That makes today Wednesday.  Figure it out."

Karen laughed.  Her son was always a little bit cloudy in the head first thing in the morning.  "No, sweetheart, the track meet wasn't last night— we went to the movies last night, don't you remember?  The film about the kidnapping?  I guess that's why you're tired this morning, that damned film was so long we didn't get home until after midnight."

Lucas shook his head in confusion.  "Mom, what are you talking about?  We went to see that movie the week before last," he said.  "Last night was the regional track meet.  Don't you remember bringing the juice and cookies for everyone?"

While Lucas talked, Karen slowly turned her newspaper around so that the front page was facing upward.  She stared at the date on the front and then held the paper up to show her son.  "Lucas, look.  Today is Saturday, Saturday the 3rd," she said.

Lucas walked over to the kitchen counter.  Casper followed closely.  Lucas gaped at the newspaper in silence for a moment, trying to grasp what he knew couldn't be true.

"Are you sure you don't want to go back to bed for a while, darling?" Karen asked.  "I'm worried you're not getting enough sleep, and it's having an effect on you.  A boy your age needs rest, especially with all the exercising you do.."

She's reading a paper from nearly two weeks ago, and I'm the one who needs to sleep some more? Lucas thought, but he didn't want to get into an argument first thing in the morning.  Instead his kissed his mother on the cheek, told her that maybe she was right, he should go rest for a while, and he headed back to his room to finish getting ready for school.  He nearly tripped over Casper as the cat trotted along in front of his feet, seemingly unwilling to part with him even for a second.  "Casper, damn it," he mumbled as he hopped out of the way to avoid crushing the cat.

Doubt swirled through Lucas's mind as he packed his bag and got himself ready for school.  He knew for sure the track meet had been last night, because he could feel it in his muscles this morning.  But even if he was wrong about that, even if yesterday was Friday and they had gone to the movies, they certainly hadn't seen that kidnapping film last night.  He was sure it was a couple of weeks ago when they saw that one.  And he was positive today must be the 14th, because one of his marathon training buddies had his birthday two days ago, on the 12th.  He remembered it specifically because James had been complaining that his birthday fell on a Monday this year, and he'd have to postpone his party until the following weekend because he figured no one would want to come to a party on a Monday.

Lucas shook his head and tried to think if there were any other clues that might clear up the confusion of today's date.  Then an idea came to him.  There's no need to question yourself or wonder about it, just check it online, that's what the internet is for, he thought.  Smiling at his own brilliant idea, he sat down on the bed and pulled his laptop out from its hiding place underneath.  Casper leapt up on the bed to sit beside him, meowing impatiently and looking out the window.  "Mom already gave you your breakfast, I saw it in the dish," Lucas mumbled to the cat while he waited for his computer to boot up.  "If you're hungry you should just go to the kitchen and eat and quit following me around like a shadow."  Casper ignored the advice and hopped up to the window sill, still meowing.  Lucas glanced back at him and said, "yeah, great idea, find some birds to watch to occupy your time."  Casper sat completely still, his gaze unwavering from the window.

When Lucas turned to face forward again the desktop had appeared on the screen, but it was clear that something was wrong— the wallpaper on the computer was a photo that Lucas had trashed about a week ago, a silly picture of some kids going out trick-or-treating dressed as cats.  Lucas liked Halloween and had left the photo up through the first week of November, but after that he thought it was getting a bit ridiculous and he'd looked online for some photos of late autumn instead.  He'd replaced the trick-or-treaters with a picture of multicoloured fallen leaves, and since he rarely reused his wallpapers he just threw the old Halloween picture away.  No need for it cluttering up precious hard drive space.  But here it was now, right back on the desktop where it was impossible for it to be.

"Damned computer," Lucas grumbled.  He ignored the wallpaper for the moment and looked instead at the little clock in the corner of the screen.  It took him a minute to digest what his eyes were telling him.  The black letters stared back at him unapologetically.  Sat 08:06.  

Okay, so his mom had been right about it being Saturday, but that was only half the problem— she also seemed convinced that today was the 3rd, and Lucas knew for certain that couldn't possibly be true.  He opened his browser, thought for a minute about which site would have reliable timekeeping, and typed in the first thing that came to mind, the web address for their local television news station.  As the page loaded, some headlines popped up, vaguely familiar stories that Lucas thought couldn't have been breaking news.  Didn't that factory fire happen a while ago? he thought.  And there it was at the top of the page, as plain as anything could be on this thoroughly surreal day: Saturday, November 3rd, 2007.

Okay, that's cool, don't panic, Lucas thought, and quickly typed in another address— cnn.com.  After a moment's pause, the site loaded, and the same impossible date of November 3rd showed on the screen.  Lucas spent the next few minutes trying several other sites, and they all told him the same thing, November 3rd.  Lucas could feel his heart beating fast in his chest.  He knew that what made the most sense was that he must be the one who was mistaken, but he was certain Monday had been the 12th, and that was now two days ago.  He was sure of it.  He closed the laptop and tried to collect his thoughts for a moment.  Certainly there was something he wasn't remembering, but after several minutes of thinking about it he still came up with nothing.  It just all seemed inconceivable.

"It's just as I suspected, Casper— the whole world's gone nuts," Lucas said as he slid the computer back under the bed.  He crawled over to the windowsill where the cat was still perched.  "But at least it's a nice surprise that it's Saturday," he added, "and Mom's going to make pancakes.  If you're nice I'll share one with you."  Lucas gently buried his nose in the cat's fur.  Casper meowed again and kept staring out the window.  Lucas could feel that the cat's muscles were still tense, like he was ready to attack at a moment's notice.  He sometimes got excited like this when there were lots of birds in the trees.  Casper was an inside cat and thoroughly enjoyed what Karen had dubbed "window hunting."  Lucas smiled at the idea of what Casper might do if he ever actually caught something.  Probably freak out and let it go and run away like a girl, he thought.  His cat was beautiful, but he wasn't what you would call macho.

Lucas turned to look out the window, to see what all the fuss was about.  "Casper, I don't know what your deal is this morning, but it's a gorgeous day and there's no reason to let some silly bir— uh, what the hell?..." His voice trailed off. He grabbed the cord next to the window and raised the blinds so he could have a better view of the scene he was sure he couldn't be witnessing.  Finally he could see what Casper had been so agitated about.  There weren't any birds in the trees this morning.  Downstairs, in the yard below the window, were six cats, facing the house.  They sat on the ground in the crunchy leaves, completely still and almost in a straight line.  They were a mixed bunch, no two the same colour or size, and they seemed to be making eye contact with Casper, which Casper was of course reciprocating.  A neighbour passed by on the sidewalk with her Rottweiler.  The dog barked loudly and pulled at his harness trying to get to the cats, but they neither flinched nor acknowledged the threat.  The woman pulled on the leash and the dog finally relented, but the cats didn't seem to notice.  "This is too fucking weird," Lucas whispered to himself.  "What the hell is going on with the world today?"  He looked at Casper, but the cat continued to stare down at the front yard.  Lucas swallowed hard and realised he was going to have to find the answer to his own questions today.  Casper had his own troubles to think about.

Okay, there's an explanation for this, Terra thought.  I'm just... there's something I'm not remembering, or my clock was wrong or... something.  She turned on the light in the sun room.  The plastic chairs they had used for orientation were stacked in the corner again and all the lounge furniture was back in the middle of the room.  She looked over toward the corner, the old man's chair.  Empty.  No sign that anyone had been here at all.

Terra stood still for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what seemed to be an impossibility.  Finally she came up with an idea, and quickly crossed the room to the far door.  She swung it open and stepped out into the breezy evening air.  Going outside the hotel was forbidden for this retreat, but at this point she cared little for the rules.  She walked out about twenty feet from the hotel and turned around, half-afraid of what she might see.

But there was nothing to see.  All the upstairs windows were dark.  Even Rose had abandoned her post.  After several minutes of intense thought, Terra could only come to two conclusions: either everyone was asleep at half past seven, or the hotel was empty.  Neither scenario made any sense, but neither did about half the things that had happened to Terra since she'd arrived here.

It was then that she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye, and Terra turned to her right.  The cats.  They were in greater number than ever now, perhaps a hundred or more, still not crossing the invisible barrier that kept them from approaching the hotel.  The were quiet, though there was an energy about them, and they were staring at her.  She felt a chill in her blood and ran back to the hotel door.  She hurried through the sun room and the hallway, and back up the stairs.  She stopped when she got to the second floor, the men's floor.  There was only one way to find out if people were asleep.

"Hello?  Hello, is anyone awake?  Hello, I need help!"

Nothing.

She tried again, this time knocking on the first door she saw.  "Hello?  Is anyone in there?  Can someone please come out and speak to me?"

She knocked on the door repeatedly, loudly.  No answer.

Terra took a deep breath and shouted down the hall, "CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?  HELLO?  ANYONE?  PLEASE?"

No response.

She spun back toward the door she'd been knocking on.  Her heart pounded as she tried the doorknob.  True to the rules, it wasn't locked.  It turned easily in her hand and the door swung silently inward.  She clicked the light switch inside the doorway.

The room was empty.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, Terra thought.  There were fewer people than rooms, that's for sure, so they probably didn't use every room.  This is just a room that never had anyone in it.

She paused.

But if the other rooms are occupied, why isn't anyone answering me?

Terra turned and leapt up the stairs again.  When she got to the third floor she ran around like a madman, flinging open every door on both sides of the hall while shouting unintelligibly.  When she got back down to her end of the hall, right in front of room 36, she finally broke down.  She dropped to her knees and sobbed.

"Where is everybody?" she screamed through her tears.

She cried on the floor for several minutes and then made an attempt to pull herself together.  "Okay, okay, it's all going to be okay, I just have to get out of here, I just have to get back to the bus station," she told herself.  She went back into her room and turned every light on— bedroom, balcony, bathroom, bedside lamp.  She grabbed her duffel bag and took it over to the dresser, sweeping her arm across the top of the dresser and forcing all of her toiletries to tumble into her bag at once.  She yanked her clothes from the drawers and stuffed them in the bag also, and finally put her computer in her backpack.  She did a couple of circuits of the room just to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, and then, satisfied that she was packed, slung a bag over each shoulder and quickly exited the room, leaving all the lights on.  She ran down the stairs as fast as her bags would allow, but just as she reached the front door she had a sudden thought—

My phone.  The stuff in the envelope.  My goddamned phone.

Terra stopped with her hand already touching the door out of this place.  She wanted her stuff back, wanted her phone back especially.  She wanted to speak to Mehmet, wanted to hear the friendly voice of someone who was on her team.

 Terra paused for a moment to think.  Should  I just forget the envelope and go? She wondered.  She knew that her personal safety was more important than easily replaceable gadgets, but was she really in danger?  There didn't appear to be anyone around and Terra didn't feel threatened.  I just feel creeped out, she thought, and that's probably just my imagination rather than real danger.  It would be silly if I ran out of here and didn't even make an attempt to get my stuff back.  I mean, how complicated can it be?  It's probably somewhere obvious like at the reception desk.

Or it's locked in a safe where I have no chance in hell of ever getting at it, she added.  But at least I should find out.  At least I should try.

She turned around and made her way back into the hallway.  She vaguely remembered that the reception desk was somewhere to the right, or at least that's the direction she had seen lots of people coming from earlier in the day.  She turned right at the staircase and headed down another hall, turning lights on as she went.  Sure enough, very soon the hall opened out into the reception area.  Terra couldn't see offhand how one was supposed to get behind the front desk, so she dropped her bags and hoisted herself onto the countertop.  Swinging her legs around, she dropped down to the other side.  Where would they have kept those envelopes?  It suddenly crossed her mind that if all the people were gone, so might be the valuables.  Could it have been a scam?  If it was, they went through a lot of trouble just to get her phone and iPod.  But Terra knew now that she could assume nothing, and she set about in search of anything that might give her a clue as to where her belongings had gone.

The desk behind the reception counter was full of papers and all the normal office supplies, so Terra started at one end and began opening every drawer and cabinet.  There was nothing resembling the manila envelopes anywhere.  As she searched she became more frantic, raking things from the drawers out onto the floor in her panic to find her phone.  When she got to the other side of the desk, however, she spotted something— the hotel phone, sitting on the counter and plugged into the phone jack on the wall.  It was an old rotary phone, but as long as she could make a call it would do.  Her hand was trembling as she raised the phone to her ear and laughed in relief as she heard the wonderful sound of the dial tone.  It seemed to take forever for the rotary wheel to go around as she entered Mehmet's number.

"Hello?"  Terra thought he sounded eager, maybe even panicked.

"Hey, um... it's me."  I thought I would have had a lot more to say than that, Terra thought.

"Where the hell are you?"  Mehmet asked.  "I thought you would have called hours ago.  I've been trying to ring your phone but it's switched off.  I've been worried sick.  Are you not on the bus yet?"

Terra stood in stunned silence.  She had no idea what this conversation was about.

"Hello, are you still there?" Mehmet asked.  "Please tell me what's wrong, did you lose your phone?"

Terra tried to collect her thoughts.  "I... I'm at the hotel, of course, I... yeah, I did lose my phone, actually.  Well, they never gave it back to me, I mean, they're not here, they're... what did you mean when you asked if I was on the bus yet?"

"Terra, what's wrong with you?"  Mehmet sounded worried.

"I just... I don't understand why you would expect me to be on a bus when I only started this retreat today and you weren't expecting to hear from me for ten more days."

Now it was Mehmet's turn to be silent for a moment. "Baby, what are you talking about?  The retreat finished this morning, didn't it?  At least, that's when it was scheduled to finish according to the calendar in our bedroom.  Are you feeling okay?"

Terra had no clue what was going on, but she needed a few minutes to think.  She gave a little nervous laugh and told Mehmet, "yes, of course, of course it finished, I'm just... you know, getting used to being back in the real world.  But I'm fine, really.  I'm on my way to the bus station now, and I'll be home in the morning, okay?"

Mehmet sighed.  "Well, okay, as long as you're sure you're all right... look, call me when you get to the bus station, okay?  I'm worried that place has addled your brain."  He tried to laugh, but failed, and his voice trailed off.

Terra swallowed.  "Yeah, okay," she said.  "I'll call you from a pay phone at the station.  I'll speak to you soon."

After she hung up the phone Terra nearly lost her balance.  She was overwhelmed with confusion and fear, and sat down for a moment in the leather chair meant for the front desk clerk.  Her head was spinning and she wanted so badly to be home.  She buried her face in her hands and tried to slow her breathing down.  Finally she swivelled the chair around to face the back wall.  There was a door with glass panels, leading into a place which was presumably the manager's office.  A huge desk dominated the room, a desk which appeared to have nothing on it except for one small item in the middle.

And from a distance, that item certainly did look like it might be a stuffed manila envelope. 

Terra stood up slowly and made her way over to the glass door.  She tried the handle, but the door was locked.  The one door I need to open, and of course that's the one they lock, she thought.  She strained to see what the light-coloured object on the desk was, but it was dark inside the office and the desk was too far away from the door to see anything for sure.  Terra turned back around and scanned her eyes over the reception desk.  They settled on the heaviest-looking object there— an old manual typewriter.  Terra grabbed the typewriter firmly and carried it over to the office door.  Closing her eyes, she swung the typewriter toward the glass panel nearest the door handle.  There was a crashing noise as glass shattered.  Terra placed the typewriter on the floor and carefully reached through the jagged hole in the glass and  unlocked the office door from the inside.

As the door slowly opened, Terra slowly stepped into the office.  She made her way over to the desk and leaned over to pluck the object from it.  The weight in her hand felt comfortable, and when she turned the package around, sure enough— there was her name scrawled across the envelope in her own familiar handwriting.  She ripped the top of the envelope open and was relieved to find her phone, iPod, and camera inside.  She shoved the gadgets into her pockets, ran out of the office, launched herself over the reception desk, quickly slung her bags over her shoulder and sprinted for the exit door.

When she got outside Terra took a moment to catch her breath.  The next thing she needed to do was get herself to the bus station.  She liked neither thought of having to struggle with speaking to Turkish directory assistance about a taxi, nor the option of phoning Mehmet back and worrying him further by asking him to call a taxi for her.  The cats, now a heaving mass of several hundred, waited impatiently at the invisible barrier.  Terra wasn't afraid of them, in fact she couldn't wait to get on that side of the barrier herself.  As she tried to come up with a plan to get back to the bus station, she saw some movement out of the corner of her eye, in the direction of the hotel.  Terrified, she managed to force herself to look.

As soon as she turned to face the hotel, all the lights she had turned on all turned off at once, and the hotel went dark.  Terra gasped.  She glanced up where she thought she'd seen the movement.  There in the corner of the third floor, where her room had been, Terra thought she saw two shadowy figures on the balcony, one much taller than the other.  Terra's heart pounded in her chest, and she ran with all her might toward the invisible barrier.  As she reached it, the cats made a small pathway for her to pass, and they bounded after her down the dark beach walkway.  She didn't stop or turn around to see how many of them were following her.  Judging from the endless sound of pattering paws on the pavement, she figured it must be all of them.  Terra didn't care why they were doing it, she just hoped it was only the cats behind her as she ran with all her might toward the direction of the town.

She ran for about fifteen minutes until she couldn't anymore, her bags weighing her down and making her prematurely tired.  She finally slowed to a walk and noticed that she already felt better just from getting away from the hotel and having a little exercise.  Terra's muscles felt stiff and weak, and she asked herself why.  Is it possible I really did sleep for ten days? she wondered.  She searched for her phone and found it in her front pocket.  As she turned it on, she told herself this was probably all a mistake, all just some weird series of unfortunate coincidences and crossed wires between her and Mehmet.  After all, it was inconceivable for a human to sleep for that long.  It was the stuff of children's stories, of fairy tales.  As her phone sprang to life, Terra punched in her password.  She stood in stunned silence as the phone found a signal and the time and date came up on the display.

No, Terra thought.  Impossible. That can't be today's date.

She pressed the button that would take her to the log of her recent call history.  This would straighten everything out once and for all.

When she saw the log, there it was, plain as day: Terra's most recent outgoing call had indeed been to Mehmet, in the early afternoon... eleven days ago.

Terra felt her throat tighten and her breathing quicken as cats meowed and swirled around her feet.  They seemed happy just to be in her presence, pleased to follow her wherever she went.  She checked the time on her phone.  It was nearly nine in the evening.  She decided she'd better get to the bus station before the last cross-country buses departed for the night.  Terra waded through the cats as they once again parted in the middle to give her room to walk.  She couldn't even contemplate the strangeness of this whole situation.  She just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.  She wanted to get home.

As Terra made her way down the length of the beach walkway, the weather suddenly turned very cold and windy.  Two minutes later, the skies opened up and torrential rain came pelting in almost horizontally from the beach.  Terra couldn't even be bothered to dig her rain coat out of her bag; by the time she thought of it she was already soaked through anyway.  It was the cats that held her attention now— not one of them had been scared off by the rain.  She knew that cats didn't like water, they would normally do anything to keep from getting wet... and yet, here they still were.  Their mood was distinctly more subdued than before, most of them had stopped meowing, but they didn't run away.  They seemed to be refusing to leave her side.  They followed her quietly, hundreds of them swarming around her in the pouring rain as if she were their queen.

Terra reeled at the bizarreness of it all.  She briefly thought about how it would look if she arrived at the bus station with several hundred cats in tow.  She hoped that they would disperse before then, that perhaps there would be another invisible barrier at the other end of the walkway, near the town itself.  After all, when she first came to this place she was pretty sure she hadn't encountered any cats until she reached the beach, so she figured they were probably confined to that area for some reason.

But once Terra reached the marina, she knew she'd been wrong in her assumptions.  Not only did the cats follow her into the town, but she picked up some new ones along the way.  The rain had mercifully stopped, and as she started to come across people, mostly shopkeepers shutting down for the night. Terra was torn between being relieved to see them and being embarrassed that she couldn't explain why this gigantic mass of felines was thronging around her.  She got more than a few strange looks from the locals, but eventually she did manage to make her way up to the bus station.

She had no idea how difficult it was going to be to get a bus ticket.  Aside from the fact that it was getting pretty late and many of the buses were already fully booked, some of the ticket agents didn't even want to speak to Terra because of the cats.  She had to admit to herself that it must look strange, and even though she'd managed to leave the majority of the cats outside, a few had managed to sneak into the bus station, and every time someone opened the door to enter or leave, a few more cats would squeeze through.  Eventually though, Terra did manage to find a ticket for a bus that was leaving just before midnight.

She went back outside and sat down on a bench, careful not to crush any cats as she settled down to rest for a minute.  Other travellers were not hiding their amazed and sometimes accusatory stares, but Terra was so glad to be among normal people again that she didn't care what they thought of her.  After she sat down, cats poured up onto the bench and into her lap, and she giggled a little.  She wished she understood what was going on— she had a feeling the cats meant well and had some legitimate reason to be drawn to her, but she couldn't imagine what that reason might be.  She had cats nudging her arms, curling up in her lap, and sitting at her feet.  This is cute and creepy at the same time, she thought, if that's even possible.  I love cats, and yet... something's not right about this.  "You guys are freaky,"  Terra said.  "And no, I don't have any food," she added.

When the time for the bus departure was drawing near, Terra stood up and approached one of the bus station attendants.  He looked frightened, but he at least attempted to smile.  Terra smiled back and asked if he would help her.

"Wh-what kind of help did you need?" the man asked, clearly afraid of what she might say next.

"I need to get on the bus without these cats," Terra replied.  "As you can see, it's a problem."

The man nodded vigourously and looked nervously at the animals.  "Can't you just tell them to go away?" he said.

Terra rolled her eyes.  If I could do that, don't you think I would have done it already? she thought.  "Um, it's not really as simple as that," she said to the attendant.  "I mean, obviously they don't understand human speech.  Believe me, nothing would make me happier than if I could just tell them to go away."  She smiled to let the man know she wasn't annoyed with him, but rather with the situation.

He laughed softly and tried to make a joke by looking at the cats and saying, "go away!  Go away!  Go bother someone else!"  There was no response from the cats.  The attendant laughed harder.  Terra decided to put him at ease by joining in on his joke.  "Go away!" she said to the cats.  "Go back to the beach and stay there!"

No sooner than the last word had escaped her lips, the attendant gasped and covered his mouth.  Terra turned around to face the direction he was looking, and her jaw dropped.  The cats were leaving.  Not just a few of them, but all of them, as if they'd heard her command.  No way, she thought, and she just stood there for a moment watching them head down toward the direction of the marina.  They walked slowly, purposefully.  Terra paused and bit her lip, and then tested what seemed to be an impossibility.  "Wait," she said.  "Wait, don't go.  Stop," she told the cats.

They stopped, all of them, and they turned to face her as if waiting for the next instruction.  A look of horror passed over the attendant's face, and as Terra's bus pulled into the station, the attendant ran inside the building and started hurriedly whispering something to one of the security guards.  The security guard craned his neck to see what was going on.  Terra panicked and turned back toward the cats.  

"Go!" she shouted.  "Get out of here!"

As the cats departed, Terra ran toward the bus.  The security guard and the attendant were now both staring at the cats, and then the guard focused his gaze on Terra.  She wanted to get out of here before anyone made more problems for her.  All she wanted to do was be at home where things were normal and safe.  She gave the driver her bags and took the stairs into the bus two by two.  She found her seat quickly and sat as low in it as she possibly could.  The security guard and the attendant walked over to the bus, looking around suspiciously, and spoke to the driver.  There was an animated conversation among the three of them, with lots of pointing glances in the direction of the cats, but eventually the driver shrugged and sent them away.  Clearly he didn't care about such nonsense  Terra sighed in relief as the attendant and the guard retreated back into the bus station, looking over their shoulders periodically to check the progress of the cats.  Terra looked down toward the marina herself.  She could see the shadows of a few retreating animals, the stragglers at the back of the group, but for the most part the cats were already gone.  With a lump in her throat, Terra settled back into her seat.  She was so exhausted that she was asleep before the bus even left the station.

Back in the sun room, things seemed a lot more cheery than they had previously.  The presence of the hippies really livened things up, and despite the fact that she suspected she wouldn't want to be friends with a single one of them in real life, on this particular occasion Terra was really glad they were here.  She scanned the room for any sign of the old man, but he didn't appear to be anywhere.  The short-haired woman spotted Terra and crossed the room in grand strides.  Terra noted that when the room was full of noisy people, the sound of footsteps was no longer audible.

The short-haired woman smiled broadly and extended her hand.  "Hi, I'm Terra, nice to meet you," she said.

What?

Terra could hardly believe what she had just heard.  "Excuse me?" she said.  "Sorry, I mean, did you say your name was Tara?  Because my name is Terra, with an e."

The woman wrinkled her face up in confusion.  "No, I said my name was Denise."

Terra blinked a couple of times.  She didn't quite know how to respond.

Denise smiled again and shrugged, "ah, it doesn't matter," she said.  "this room is so echoey, it's difficult to hear things when everyone is talking.  And as you can see," she gestured to the young hippies, "my friends do like to talk.  I have no idea how they're going to be completely silent for ten days!"  Denise laughed heartily.

Terra smiled and said nothing.  Once again she felt... frightened?  No, not frightened, she thought.  Like Mehmet had said, she just wasn't good with new people.  These sorts of unpleasant feelings always came bubbling up when she had to meet people for the first time.  She decided she was just flustered, not frightened.  Frightened would be too dramatic a description.

Denise picked up the slack in the conversation.  "So, Terra, is this your first time doing one of these things?"

Terra liked questions she already knew the answer to.  "No," she said.  "I've been to quite a few of them, actually.  Never here, though, and obviously never with this group, but... yeah.  I'm not new to this."

Denise furrowed her brow.  "Well, you do know," she said, "that you can't predict what will happen during one of our courses based on your previous experiences elsewhere.  We don't really copy anyone else's style, we kind of have our own way of doing things here."

Why does everyone keep calling it a course? Terra thought.  "Yeah, well, I'm pretty open-minded, so I don't anticipate any snags," she said.

"I should hope not," Denise replied sternly.  All traces of the smile had dissolved from her face.  

Terra cleared her throat and tried to think of something to say to lighten the mood, but she never got the chance.  Denise suddenly snapped back into her cheerful mode and patted Terra firmly on the shoulder.  "Well, I hope you find this a fulfilling experience, " she said, and strode off toward her friends, whose chatter had not stopped since they exited the van.  Terra exhaled and noted that there was now one less new person left to meet.  She was looking forward to the point where it would be time for the silence.  If she could make it through until then, she knew everything would be okay.

Slowly more people started arriving, trickling in one by one, a few on foot and a couple of them by taxi.  They each had the same look of trepidation that told Terra she wasn't the only outsider after all.  As they each arrived, Denise would greet them with the same broad smile, and send them off to their lounge chairs with the same firm pat on the shoulder.  Terra thought it all seemed kind of artificial, but then she supposed that it must be difficult to think of creative things to say to thirty different people who are all there for the same reason.

At precisely two o'clock a bell rang.  Terra couldn't see where the bell was, but it was a loud, deeply resonant sound that suggested the source was quite large.  The room went suddenly quiet, and Denise announced that orientation was about to begin.  She pointed to several stacks of plastic chairs collected in the corner, and asked that each person take one chair and wait over on the far side of the room.  As people lined up for their chairs, Denise started to move the lounge furniture to the margins of the room to make space for the orientation.  She was soon joined by a young man who appeared from the same hallway where Rose and the old man had mysteriously entered and never returned.  Terra was suddenly overwhelmed with a desire to run outside and see if Rose still had her hand pressed to that upstairs window, but she resisted the temptation.

Denise and the young man quickly shifted the remainder of the lounge furniture from the centre of the room, and then the man invited everyone to bring their chairs to the middle and arrange them facing him.  Terra noticed that there was no conversation during this exercise, that even the previously motor-mouthed hippies were now completely silent.  Terra wondered what it was that had shut them up so effectively, if it was respect for Denise, or for this new guy, or something else.

Once everyone was seated the young man introduced himself as John, the supervisor of the men, and he introduced Denise as the supervisor of the women.  Denise flashed her broad smile once again, and Terra chuckled to herself as she imagined Denise flicking a switch to turn the smile on and off.  John started handing out small booklets to each of the attendees.  When Terra got hers she noticed it said "course guidelines."  She sighed at the repeated use of that word —this was, after all a retreat— but opened the booklet and flipped through the pages.  There were no surprises; these things were the same wherever you went and the rules were always identical.  For the duration of the ten days, there would be no talking, and indeed no communication of any kind.  Eye contact and physical touching were forbidden.  The men would be separated from the women.  There would be no food served after eleven in the morning, though water would be available at any time.  Attendees (or students, as this handbook referred to them) were asked to remain within the confines of the course boundaries— in this case, within the hotel walls.

John then requested that everyone turn to page sixteen of the booklet.  On this page Terra found a list of items that were designated as "forbidden" to have in one's possession during the course.  John explained that he'd pass out some manila envelopes, and each person was to consult the list, decide which of their belongings needed to be handed in, and seal the items up in the envelope.  Terra scanned the list.  Under the section labelled "electronics," she saw all the usual expected things— phones, music players, video players, digital cameras, and recording devices.  Oddly, she didn't see anything about laptop computers.  She knew, of course, that the computer wouldn't be allowed, but as the list didn't specifically mention it and the manila envelope was hardly big enough anyway...

Terra bit her lip and thought hard.  Lying and deception were two big things you were absolutely not supposed to do at these retreats.  Well, technically you weren't really supposed to do them anywhere, she thought, but here it was an explicit rule.

She looked at the list.

She thought about how she'd only be cheating herself if she broke the rules.

She thought about the old man's warning, but it was the phone he had warned her about, and she was planning on handing in her phone regardless.

Then she saw an image in her head of Rose and that crazy smile pressed against the upstairs window, and with that  picture clearly in her mind Terra popped her phone and her camera in the envelope along with her iPod, sealed the envelope, wrote her name in block capitals across the front, and handed the envelope to John.  When John asked her if everything was in there, she didn't make eye contact with him.  She couldn't even speak— she just nodded and sat back in her chair, and watched as John whisked the envelope away.  Bye-bye phone.

After the handing-things-over ritual, Denise asked everyone to line up in front of her so she could give out room numbers.  Terra was nearly last in line— she wasn't in a tremendous hurry to join Rose and the old man.  She waited as the line slowly progressed forward, and when she got to the front she was given a room on the third floor: number 36.  She grabbed her bags and headed toward the dark hallway, not terribly curious to find out what was in there.

Her anxiety turned out to be for nothing.  The hallway soon emptied out into a foyer of sorts, where a large staircase led up to the rooms.  When Terra got up to the third floor, she was surprised to find it light and fresh and not at all like the dim gloom of the alleged sun room.  Room 36 was right on the end, and much to her delight was on the side of the hotel that was facing the sea.  When she reached the door, however, she found it slightly ajar, and through the crack between the door and the frame she could see movement.  Movement... and a wisp of curly hair.

Oh god, please tell me she's not my roommate, Terra thought.  She gently pressed her fingertips against the door and as it slowly swung open, she was shocked to find not Rose, but rather John, putting clean sheets on the bed.  John didn't turn to face Terra, he just kept making the bed, and she figured he hadn't heard her approaching, but when he started to speak it was clear he had already known she was there.  "I slept in this room last night," he said, "so I thought you'd probably want clean sheets on the bed.  I'll just be a few minutes."

"Oh, well," Terra replied, "if this is your room I don't want to kick you out.  I'm sure there are some empty rooms left, so why don't I just take one of—"

"NO!"  John snapped, and Terra gasped a little.  "This room is yours now," he said.  "You will stay here."

"Yeah, sure, no problem," Terra said nervously.  She didn't understand what the big deal was, but clearly they had a system for room assignments, a system that had no room for flexibility.  

John finished up the bed and turned to Terra.  "Okay, you're all set," he said.  "Dinner will be at six, followed by course instructions and then an early bed time."

Terra squinted.  Course instructions?  Was she even in the right place?

John asked if anything was wrong, but Terra shook her head and John made his way out of the room.  "A bell will ring at six to let you know it's time to come down," he said.

As he left, Terra thought of something.  "Oh, John," she said, "the key?"

John first made a confused face and then laughed.  "No no no," he said.  "We don't lock doors here."

We don't?  thought Terra.  By that time, though, John had already disappeared down the staircase.

Terra lowered her bags to the floor and spent a few minutes absorbing the feel of her room.  It was a pleasant space, not quite cheery, but certainly not dreary.  The wall farthest from the door was entirely comprised of plate glass windows, two of which were sliding doors opening out onto a large balcony.  The view of the sea was incredible— the entire window was filled with sky, water, and sand.  Terra slid the doors open and stepped out onto the balcony.  Now this was a place where she could see herself spending time.  She felt lucky; half the attendees would be on the other side of the hotel, facing the land rather than the sea.

She wondered what time it was, and thought it might be a smart idea to start unpacking before too much time got away from her.  After having travelled overnight, she wanted to shower and put on some clean clothes and rest a while before the dinner bell.  She hadn't brought a tremendous amount of stuff with her, but nonetheless she liked to have everything in order.  She swung her large duffel bag onto the bed and unzipped it.  On one side was clothing, and on the other side, toiletries.  There was a small dresser without a mirror against one wall of the room, and Terra carefully laid her clothes in the drawers.  She then set about arranging her various bottles on the top of the dresser— shampoo, body wash, lotion, aspirin.  Even though she had tried to pack light, she always ended up bringing more bathroom goods than she knew what to do with.  After she completely loaded up the top of the dresser with items, she turned and fetched her backpack from the floor.  Inside was her contraband laptop, and she figured she ought to find a place to hide it seeing as not only was it forbidden, she would have no way to lock her door once she left the room.

After several minutes of considering various hiding places, Terra finally settled on the idea of sliding the computer into the bottom dresser drawer, under her clothes.  She wasn't expecting anyone to come looking for it anyway, so as long as it was out of sight that was good enough.  She grabbed the handle of the bottom drawer, but it stuck, and when she tried to pull the drawer out instead the whole dresser rocked, sending toiletries off the top of the dresser tumbling down in all directions.

"Shit!" Emma yelled, and then checked herself for being so loud.  She placed the computer on the bed and then got down on her knees to collect the fallen bottles and containers.  It was amazing how far things would travel after having dropped such a short distance.  She found things under the bed and on either side of the dresser, and piled them all on the bed next to her laptop.  But even after it appeared she had collected everything, she noticed there were still some items missing.  Where are my tweezers? she thought.  She put her face down near the floor and checked under the bed again.  Nothing.  She turned her head the other way and scanned the rest of the carpet around the dresser.  No sign of anything.  Terra sighed and got to her feet, walked over to the dresser and craned her neck over the top to have a look behind it.  There, on the ground behind the dresser, she saw something shiny and silver.  Aha! she thought, and started to pull the dresser out from the wall.  It was heavier than she expected considering it was only a small chest of drawers, and she had to kind of wiggle it out little by little, left-right-left-right.

Once she managed to pull the dresser out about a foot or so, Terra crawled around to the back.  Sure enough, there were her tweezers.  She picked them up and tossed them on the bed and then had a second look behind the dresser in case there was anything she missed.  She ran her hand along the carpet, cringing slightly because she could tell no one had ever moved the furniture to vacuum.  Convinced she had found everything, Terra started to get up to move the dresser back against the wall, but as she was about to get to her feet she spotted something.  Frowning, she squinted a little to get a better look, but she still couldn't tell what the object was.  It looked like the corner of something metal, sticking out slightly from under the dresser.

Terra exhaled and bent down again.  With her finger she gently prodded the metal corner, and then slid her finger under the dresser and fished the object out.  It was a large key, and a very old key from the look of it.  Terra brushed the dust and cobwebs from it and studied the key closely.  Maybe it's the key to my room, she thought, and immediately went over to the door.  But the lock on the door was shaped for a much more modern key, not an old skeleton key like this one.  Emma sighed in disappointment and went to the balcony door.  "This one doesn't even have a lock," she said to herself, and wondered what the key could be for.  Perhaps it was the key to a previous lock on that front door, or more likely some hotel guest just lost it a long time ago, she thought.  But as she considered the possibilities, she noted that the hotel itself didn't appear to be that old— she suspected it had only been built maybe thirty years before.  This key was clearly much older than that.  Yes, someone must have lost it behind the dresser and left it behind.  That was the most likely explanation.  But it was a pretty key, might be nice to keep, Terra thought.  She took it to the bathroom and rinsed it off in the sink, and as she washed her hands the water turned a deep grey.  Ew, she thought.  They really need to clean behind the furniture sometimes.

After she placed the key in her backpack, Terra finally got her laptop hidden away in a drawer, and then she replaced all her bathroom items on the dresser.  Satisfied with her job of settling in, she grabbed a towel from the stack in the bathroom and took a quick shower.  Hot water felt amazing after such a long night of travelling, and Terra came out refreshed and relaxed.  She put on some sweat pants and a t-shirt and settled down on the bed.  She wanted to read, but she hadn't even brought any books because reading materials were on the forbidden list.

Meditation was a funny thing.  There were so many schools of thought and so many different ways to practice.  Terra hadn't experimented too much, because it was generally accepted that one should choose a way of practising and stick with it, develop it.  Nonetheless, even within a single school of thought there were so many variations, almost as many as there were practitioners.  And retreats were yet another world entirely.  When you participated in a meditation retreat, there were always extra rules and guidelines that far exceeded the self-discipline you might expect to exercise in your daily life.  Some rules were pretty standard across the board —every retreat Terra had been to had been silent, for example— but each experience at a different place and with a different set of people brought something new.  Some retreats had great food, some had awful food or almost no food at all.  Some required you to keep a meditation journal, others (like this one) wouldn't allow you to have any reading or writing materials.  It just depended.  Terra found, though, that the important thing was being introspective, dealing less with life and more with the self.  It sounded like something those young hippies might say, but she felt the benefits of meditation certainly had a profound effect on her life.

Terra hadn't even remembered feeling sleepy, and when she woke up it was dark in the room.  She spent a few seconds confused, wondering where she was and where Mehmet was.  Then it all came flooding back to her, and she sat upright in a panic.  The retreat!  It shouldn't be this dark at six in the evening.  She must have slept through the dinner bell!  But why hadn't someone come and knocked on the door?  Flustered, Terra jumped to her feet, flicked the light on, and quickly pulled her hair back into a ponytail.  This was bad, this was a really awful way to start what should have been a relaxing ten days.  She didn't want to have the reputation of the girl who was always late for things, and if they'd already had the evening meeting she would have missed out on a lot of essential information.  Cursing herself, she slipped on her shoes and bolted out the door, accidentally slamming it behind her.

She stopped suddenly.  The hallway was dark and quiet.  There were no sounds coming from the direction of the stairwell, no sounds at all from anywhere.  It certainly didn't seem like anyone was awake in the building.  Had she napped all the way through the nine o'clock lights-out?  Even more confused than before, Terra stood still and took a few breaths.  She wished she had some way to tell the time.

Her computer!  Of course.  Terra opened the door to her room, the gentle creaking sound excruciatingly loud in the silence.  She ran over to the dresser and retrieved her laptop from its hiding place.  She sat down on the bed and opened it up, willing it to hurry through its booting-up sequence.  When the desktop finally appeared, Terra blinked a few times at the time displayed clearly in the menu bar.

19:11

Ten past seven.  The group would have just finished dinner.  They should be in the evening meeting now.

They must just be speaking so quietly in the sun room that I can't hear them from up here, she thought.  But it still didn't explain why no one had come up to wake her.  Terra shook her head, closed her computer, and shoved it back into the drawer.  As she left her room she frowned in disappointment.  None of this made sense.  Sure, the mistake was hers, but had they completely forgotten about her?  Had they not done a head count at dinner?  Certainly she was not the first person ever to sleep through a bell.  Did they not want to make sure everyone attended the evening meeting?

Terra felt along the wall until she found a light switch.  The ugly fluorescent light in the ceiling sputtered to life, and Terra made her way down the stairs.  I don't even hear anyone clearing the dishes from dinner, she thought.  Or maybe they finished dinner early.  Or maybe the clock on my computer was wrong?  No.  That couldn't be it.  Maybe I'm just still half asleep and I should stop trying to analyse everything and just get down to the meeting.

But when Terra emerged from the ground floor hallway into the sun room, she stopped cold.

There was no one there.

Terra stood for a minute and wondered why a hotel on the sea would be named after the Spanish word for river.  But she had noticed strange hotel names all up and down this stretch of coast and had learned not to think much of it.  One nautical-ranch-themed hotel was called The Cowboy Seahorse; another hotel was painted bright green and according to the sign was called the Pink Hotel.  So a hotel called river near the sea was just the icing on the cake.

It was more than an hour until the official meeting time, and since Terra had covered the distance to the hotel much more quickly than she had expected to, she was at a loss for how to spend the interval between now and the time when she could enter the hotel.  She glanced back at the cats, many of whom were still sitting at the invisible barrier.  Some, however, had clearly grown tired of staring at nothing and had wandered off to do other things.  A few of the kittens were tumbling over each other and play-fighting in what appeared to be a game of ninja leapfrog.  Terra was briefly tempted to see if there were any snacks left from the bus trip to give to the kittens, but something about these cats now made her feel uncomfortable, and she settled instead for taking some photos of them.  In the isolation of the beach the only thing in her ears was the gentle whoosh of small waves lapping at the shore and the click-click-click of the shutter opening and closing.  She hadn't even suspected that anyone else was there on the beach, much less heard the footsteps walking up behind her.

"Hello."

Terra let out a tiny yelp of surprise and whipped around.  There stood a young woman, maybe in her early twenties, smiling warmly and twirling the ends of her long, curly hair between her fingers.  A rush of relief washed over Terra and she exhaled and laughed.  "Hi, sorry, you scared me," she said.

The woman widened her smile.  "I didn't mean to, I apologise," she replied.  "You're here for the course, right?" she asked.

"Well, the retreat, yes," Terra said, slightly confused that the woman had referred to it as a course.  "I'm Terra Kaneko," she added.  She started to extend her hand and then changed her mind when she saw that the woman was making no move to shake hands.

"Hello Terra, my name is Rose," the woman said, still playing with her hair.

"Rose," Terra repeated.  "Lovely name."

"It's the name of a type of flower," Rose said.

Terra didn't quite know how to respond to this startling revelation.  "Er, yes, so it is," she said. Duh, she added silently.

"You're a little early, but if you'd like you can come inside and I'll serve some water," Rose offered.

Wow, water— they're really rolling out the red carpet, Terra thought.  She noticed that something about the way Rose spoke lent itself to sarcastic responses.  Or maybe I'm just a sarcastic bitch, she thought.  She mentally scolded herself for always being so shitty with new people, and pointed out to herself that she was the one who showed up early and this woman didn't have to invite her in at all.  "Water would be great, thanks," she finally said.  She picked up her bags and followed Rose up the walkway to the hotel.  

Terra peeked back over her shoulder at the cats; most were gone now but a few still sat on the walkway, continuing to stare through the invisible barrier that for some reason they wouldn't, or couldn't, cross.  In fact, there were so few cats sitting there now that Terra wondered if she had imagined the earlier crowd of them, perfectly aligned as if they were forcibly pressed up against a glass wall.  It seemed ridiculous now to think that cats would behave that way, but at the time she was sure that's exactly what they were doing.  And they appeared to have a phobia about crossing the line— certainly there were no cats she could see on this side of the invisible barrier, none around the hotel or even further up the beach.  But cats are good at hiding themselves, Terra reminded herself, and she accepted the possibility that just because she didn't see any cats on this side of the imaginary line didn't mean they weren't there.  They were probably tucked away somewhere, sleeping.

When Rose and Terra reached the door of the hotel Rose pushed it and it swung inward.  There didn't appear to be a lock on the door, and Terra wondered how they kept the place secure in the winter.  She guessed that theoretically there wasn't really much to steal, but nonetheless she assumed they would want to protect the place from vandals and squatters.  I guess they just board these places up and hope for the best, she thought.  To Terra it seemed easier just to fit a lock to the door.

Once Rose was inside she held the door open with that same warm smile on her face.  Has she been smiling like that the whole time? Terra wondered as she passed over the threshold into what appeared to be a poorly lit sun room.  The place smelled funny, stale, almost like it had been empty a long time, but she knew that couldn't have been the case.  This town was absolutely overrun with tourists during the summer months, and she had no reason to think this hotel wouldn't have been stuffed to capacity like all the others.  Still, it had a lonely vibe to it, and Terra felt nothing welcoming here.

The room was mostly windows from floor to ceiling, which Terra thought would have turned this place into an oven in the summer, and in the off-season the clouds and dark sky served to make the spacious area dim and gloomy.  Terra couldn't see herself wanting to spend much time in here.  The tile floor was the same non-descript beige found in every elementary school, and the lounge chairs and tables featured those ornate wicker frames so popular in the '80s, with cushions that displayed a busy floral pattern in soft blue.  All in all, it looked like the sun room of a stereotypical no-star hotel, or what Terra would have called a motel back home.

It was only after a brief look around that Terra noticed Rose was still standing in the doorway, still holding the door open, and still smiling that eerie warm smile.  She hadn't moved from that spot other than to turn her head toward Terra.  A shiver ran through Terra's body and she asked if everything was okay.  "Yes, of course," Rose replied.  "Please have a seat, I'll bring the water," she said.

Rose finally let go of the door, which slowly returned to its neutral position, and as she walked past Terra she gestured to one of the wicker lounge chairs.  "Please, do sit down," she repeated, and then she disappeared down a dark hallway into the main part of the hotel.  Terra took a deep breath and lowered her bags to the floor.  She walked over to one of the plate glass windows and stared out at the beach, which now looked farther away somehow.  She studied the walkway and the sand for any sign of the cats, but there was nothing.  She couldn't see far enough to her left to tell if there were cats still sitting at the invisible barrier, but she suspected they were all long gone by now.

Terra turned away from the window and studied the empty sun room.  It was a large room, and there were long tables stacked on one end that led her to believe it might have doubled as a buffet area in the busy months.  Even in her rubber-soled shoes her steps echoed off the tiles, and Terra had a sudden thought that there would be no one to hear her if she called for help.  Laughing at her own melodrama, she lowered herself into one of the lounge chairs and pulled her phone out of her pocket.  She called Mehmet again.  He answered on the fifth ring and she could hear the sounds of a busy office in the background.

"Hey, it's me again," she said.

"Oh, hey."

"Sorry I'm calling so much."

"No, no, it's great.  I mean, we won't get to talk for two weeks or whatever, so we should talk now as much as we can."

"Yeah, I guess you're right."

"So what's it like there?"

Terra paused.  "It's, uh... yeah, it's okay.  It's a little creepy, but yeah, it's fine."

"Why are you whispering?"

"Am I?"

"Yes, you are."

Terra giggled.  "I don't know, I guess it's just so quiet here I feel like I'm disturbing things if I speak too loudly."

"Well that's good, right?  I mean, it's peaceful.  Are you still the only person around?"

"No, I'm in the hotel now.  One of the organisers is here and she saw me standing outside and she invited me in.  But I think it's just me and her.  We're the only two people around.  The lights are all off and the place is completely quiet."

"Hmm, weird."

"What's weird?  It's the off-season."

"Yeah, but, aren't they supposed to be getting things ready?  I mean, certainly it takes more than just one girl on her own to organise the retreat and prepare everything."

Terra thought about it.  "Well, maybe they prepared everything yesterday so that it would all be ready today."

"But then, wouldn't they have all slept in the hotel last night?  Where else could they have possibly gone?"

Terra laughed, but Mehmet had a point.  "Stop trying to freak me out, " she said.  "Maybe they've all gone to lunch or something."

"Yeah, you're probably right," Mehmet replied.  "Hey, I need to go now, call me back again before it starts, okay?  I'll speak to you then."

Terra hung up the phone and leaned back into her chair.  As she closed her eyes to try to relax, it occurred to her that Rose had been gone a long time considering she had only gone to fetch water.  Perhaps she's going all out and bringing lemon slices with the water as well, Terra thought, and then immediately scolded herself for being so mean.  This wasn't supposed to be a luxury vacation, the whole point was—

"You know they won't allow you to keep that," a stern voice boomed.  Terra's heart leapt out of her chest and she clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle the scream that was trying to escape.  She quickly got up from her chair and looked around the room.  There, in the corner, was a man reclining in one of the lounge chairs.  She was certain he hadn't been there earlier, but she couldn't see how he could have entered the room after her without her knowing about it.  If he had come in from either the main part of the hotel or the beach, he would have had to have walked directly in front of her chair in order to reach the corner where he was now sitting.  And even if he had managed miraculously to traverse the tile floor in complete silence, how on earth had she not heard him open the door?

As Terra's breathing returned to normal, the man spoke again.  "I was just saying, they won't allow you to keep that phone with you.  You know that, right?  You have to hand in all your electronic devices," he said.  His hands were folded over his chest and he had a stern look on his face.  He was a thin, long-limbed man, older, with thick, unruly grey hair and a bushy grey beard.  She thought he would have made a good Santa Claus had he not been so thin.  The thought relaxed her a bit and she felt a little silly that she hadn't noticed a man who clearly must have been in the room long before she ever got there.

She finally found her voice.  "Yeah, I know, I was just making some calls now while I still can," she said, and laughed nervously.  She slowly sat back down in her chair, and noticed that even in her reclining position, she still had a clear line of sight to the old man.  How had she not seen him before?  All that time she had spent looking around the room, she was certain there had been no one else there.  No, he must have come in after she did.  But then how did she not hear him cross the room?

He sat up in his chair and slowly got to his feet.  He was even taller than Terra had guessed, well over six feet.  He looked at her with his sharp blue eyes and asked, "would you like something to drink?  Some water, maybe?"

Terra gulped.  Yeah, some water would be nice, if it would ever fucking get here, she thought.  She cleared her throat and said, "actually, I think Rose went to get some water.  I'm here a little early, you see."

The old man nodded and crossed the room slowly.  His shoes made tremendous clacking sounds on the tiles.  There's no way I wouldn't have heard that, Terra thought.  So he must have been in that chair before I arrived.  But if that were the case, then he would have already known that Rose had gone to get the water.  Terra clenched her teeth as the old man made his way toward the doorway that led into the hotel, the same doorway through which Rose had disappeared.  When he reached the entrance to the dark hallway the man stopped walking and turned around to face Terra. "You know, it's the name of a flower," he said.  "Rose, I mean."

Terra nodded nervously and tried to force a smile.  The man gave a single nod back and vanished into the darkness of the hallway.  Terra decided she needed some fresh air, and practically sprinted out the door of the sun room into the nearly warm afternoon.  Autumn hadn't quite taken full hold yet, but summer was definitely losing its fight.  Terra fumbled in her pocket for her phone, but just as she managed to grasp it in her hand she heard the unmistakable sound of a car approaching.  She looked to her left, and sure enough, a large van was slowly making its way up the pedestrian walkway.  It had to dodge benches and trees here and there, but for the most part the driver seemed competent and Terra was impressed how easily he navigated the narrow passage.  She released her hold on her phone and waited to see what would transpire.  She could hear the thumping bass of really loud music.

When the van pulled up in front of the hotel, a sliding door on the side flew open and an almost comical number of people started spilling out of the vehicle, backpacks in tow.  The music suddenly became deafening, a pounding dance mix that did not at all fit the look of the van's passengers.  They appeared to be a group of young hippies, mostly tie-dyed t-shirts and long hair.  Terra would have expected them to have been more into the Dead than the Vengaboys, but you never could tell with kids these days.  She thought the oldest of the group might have been near thirty, but most of these people appeared to be young students, perhaps with an average age of twenty.  They were bouncy and noisy and clearly glad to be out of the van.  She guessed they had come quite a long way to be here, and Terra, who normally didn't like loud people, was thankful for the lift in atmosphere and welcomed their jovial mood.  She even wanted to talk to them, but as they were all speaking Turkish she didn't feel comfortable.  She continued to stand near the walkway and simply watched as they emptied the van of their belongings.

 As the group started to make their way toward the entrance to the sun room, the door opened from the inside and the hippies were greeted by someone who, bafflingly, was neither Rose nor the old man.  It was a different young woman, with a large frame and a short haircut.  It was clear right from the start that all the people from the van knew her, and this was a sort of reunion.  A cheer went up, and the short-haired woman was suddenly smothered with hugs and greetings.  Great, Terra thought.  I'm the only outsider.  She slowly retreated around the back end of the van and made her way onto the sandy beach.  She retrieved her phone from her pocket and once again called Mehmet.

"Baby, you wouldn't believe it, this place is so fucking weird."

"Weird how?  Just new people?"

"Well, there's that, and... god, I don't know.  They're freaking me out.  They behave really oddly."

"Yeah, I can hear them in the background," Mehmet said.  "It sounds to me like they're just having a good time."

"No, not those people," Terra said.  "The people in the hotel.  Or at least, I think they're in the hotel.  Hell, I'm not even sure."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know.  The whole thing feels wrong.  I want to come home."

Mehmet sighed.  "Well, of course I'd love to have you back here, but I thought you really wanted to do this.  And you took that endless bus ride to get there and everything."

"I do want to do this.  These things are great."

"So then give it a chance, okay?  I'm sure once you get used to them you'll realise those people are really nice."

Now it was Terra's turn to sigh.  "I know, I know.  Okay, look, they're going to make me hand in my phone soon, so I guess I'll probably switch it off now.  I love you, and I'll speak to you in ten days."

"I love you too, sweetheart.  Relax and have a good time, and I'll see you when you get back."

Terra switched off her phone and shoved it back in her pocket.  She had a fleeting idea that she might hide the phone there, and when it was time to turn electronics in she could lie and say she hadn't brought her phone.  But the old man already knew she had it, had seen her talking on it.  He'd even warned her about it.  No, she didn't think she could get away with not turning it in.  She sighed and made her way back up the beach toward the hotel.  She glanced up at the upstairs rooms, and in one of the windows she saw Rose standing there, one hand pressed to the window and that same exact smile on her face, the smile Terra had once thought was warm but now might describe as lunatic.  Rose was not moving, not shifting her gaze.  If she saw Terra, she didn't let on.  She simply continued to stare out the window, smiling.  Yeah, well, thanks for bringing that water, Terra thought.  She didn't even rebuke herself for the sarcasm this time.

The week that changed everything started with a long bus ride.  In fact, Terra Kaneko noticed that nearly everything that happened in this country, life-changing or otherwise, started with a bus ride.  This particular journey had been uneventful, as bus rides go.  Twelve hours from the time she started, Terra emerged from the bus on the other side of Turkey, with the sea now to the north of her rather than the south.  She felt like it was some sort of birthing process, squeezing through the narrow door of the bus with her backpack and her bag of essentials, out into the humid, overcast late morning.  Fresh, damp air flooded her nostrils; her legs ached from being folded in the womb of seat 19 for so many hours.

The town was pretty much what Terra had been expecting, pretty much like all the seaside towns up and down the coast— small, quiet, almost melancholy at this time of year.  She milled around the centre of town for about half an hour, just getting a feel for the place and looking in the shop windows.  It was amazing the kind of stuff people were apparently interested in buying— used garden tools, socks for small dogs, Viagra by the pill.

   Terra checked the time.  Still hours before she had to be at the hotel.  She was curious to see it; she'd been to these things before and they'd always been held in much more sequestered settings.  Most venues were communities of cottages in the hills or the woods somewhere, in the middle of nature and away from anything resembling urban or especially tourist life.  Exactly the sort of place where renegade branches of whatever major religion would gather their followers and withdraw from society.  Not so different from what we're doing here now, Terra thought.  Except this is the Reader's Digest version.

Orhan Pamuk had once written a book about bus rides.  Something like that, anyway.  Maybe it wasn't really about that, per se, but that was how she remembered it now.  She'd read the book once on a bus ride of her own back from Istanbul.  The book had been a gift from a woman she'd met there, a fellow traveler who had been next door to her in the bed and breakfast where they'd both stayed.  Maybe the book was actually about something else, Terra vaguely remembered, but buses had featured prominently, and since buses were a big part of what was going on in her life at the time, that was the part of the tale that stuck in her head.  A lot of stories are like that— you think they're about one thing in particular, but really they're only about that in your own mind.  There are some novels you just can't be objective about.

Another time check.  Three hours until the meeting time.  And they'd specifically said not to be early.

Terra got out the map of the local area.  She couldn't find a real map, so she'd printed one off Google.  The resolution was low and you couldn't really see the street names, but it hardly mattered.  All these towns were pretty much interchangeable after a while.  This one's only distinguishing characteristic was that the beach was basically separate from the town, a long stretch of hotels and bars forming a sort of tourist-infested exclamation point which jutted out of the round dot of a Turkish hamlet.  The Rio Hotel was at the very top of the exclamation point, which meant the choice of venue made sense in terms of needed isolation (tourists were nothing but a fading memory this late in the year), but the distance from the bus station didn't help if you were on foot and carrying several bags.  In her head Terra tried to shape thoughts of the impending walk into an idea of shouldering her burden, a metaphor that only worked for a few minutes until she started whining internally and wishing she had enough extra money to take a taxi.  There was cash in her purse, but she decided she'd rather save the taxi money and spend extra on a nice early lunch instead.  

She spotted a café near the marina and decided to sit and eat one final meal.  The café appeared to be nothing special, but as long as some dish that included dead animal flesh was on the menu, she was in.  Once she was in the hotel there would be no meat for almost two weeks.  She'd gone for a stretch that long a couple of times before, and it had been difficult to say the very least.  In fact, it was more of a strain than any of the other aspects of being locked up.

As for the money situation, this was one of those areas where Terra had learned to live with contradictions.  She was a classical pianist by trade, an occupation that only paid well if you were tremendously more skilled than mediocre, and even the mediocre pianists in the field were fantastically talented.  Terra rated herself at the lower end of mediocre, and although she had a pretty regular stream of gigs, more of them were weddings and funerals than she'd care to admit.  Still, playing piano paid some of the bills, and Mehmet thankfully took up the slack.  They weren't rich by any means.  Hell, they didn't even have a car yet.  But things were stable, and maybe even looking up.

Mehmet was the one thing that differentiated this time from the others.  Terra had always been alone when she had made these trips before, and being alone had its advantages and disadvantages.  For one thing, single people naturally feel less attachment than, well, attached people.  And lack of attachment, lack of clinging was important here.  But clinging occurs everywhere, not just in human relationships.  Terra loved her electronics, felt almost religious about them.  In her backpack was her laptop, her Palm, her mobile, her iPod, and of course her beloved digital camera.  This trip would be nothing if not well-documented with photos.  Except, of course, for the twelve days of separation from the real world.  There would be no cameras allowed where she was going.  Nothing electronic at all.  She'd have to hand it all in at the door.  In that sense it was sort of like checking into prison.

Terra sat down at the café and ordered a small pizza with every kind of meat available.  She sat quietly waiting for it to arrive at the table, while the waiter tried to make small talk.  Terra stumbled along in her broken Turkish, with the waiter pretending to be impressed with her language skills.  Turkish was a particular sticking point with Terra; she'd learned to read remarkably well, but participating in spoken conversation was still a struggle.  Eventually the waiter gave up and withdrew to the kitchen, and Terra sighed with relief as he brought out her pizza.  She lingered over every bite as if it were her final meal.  Every time she did this she thought it shouldn't be such a big deal to live on a vegetarian diet for two weeks, but somehow it always was.

Finally she made up her mind that she'd waited around long enough, and decided the long walk to the hotel would be much easier if she started now and took it slowly.  After all, she didn't even know if she really knew how to get there, and of course there was the baggage to think about.  All she had for guidance were a pixelated map and her own instincts, which historically were dodgy at best.  A small spark of anxiety popped up; she pushed it back beneath the surface and got to her feet.  Worst case scenario, she'd have to stop and ask a local for directions.  No big deal.

Despite her unease, the walk to the hotel was spectacularly uneventful.  Terra found the beach easily enough, and there was a paved path for pedestrians that might have been wide enough for a car in an emergency.  She marveled that as far as she could see, there did not appear to be another person anywhere.  The solitude calmed her, as solitude always did.  She'd expected this early autumnal weather to have slowed the resort towns down somewhat prematurely, but what we had here was a veritable ghost town.  Hotels were boarded shut; inside the restaurants she could see chairs piled on top of tables.  During the hour's walk to the hotel she only spotted two other people, and they were about a hunded feet out from the shore in a small fishing boat.  It's a good thing I didn't need to ask anyone for directions after all, she thought.

In fact, the fishermen would have been the only sign of life in this remote end of the town... Had it not been for the cats.  Terra was a big fan of cats, as was Mehmet.  They had one of their own, a rescued cat that Mehmet had taken off the street and given a loving home.  He'd adopted the cat before they even met, and in fact Terra had taken it as a good sign.  Cat people couldn't be bad people, she figured.  And people who rescued street cats really couldn't be bad people.  It turned out she'd been right in this case. 

The cats in this area were peculiar because they were consistently friendly and unusually numerous.  Terra suspected the high birth rate was due to the fact that even if you're a cat, there's not much else to do in a seaside resort once the weather turns.  As she passed hotels and bars, she saw several nursing mother cats with softly mewing kittens.  All stopped nursing when they saw her and ran over for attention and affection.  Terra happily obliged; she was not in a hurry to get to the hotel after the stern warning from the organisers not to arrive early.  As the she petted the mother cats, others emerged from the direction of the buildings and swirled around her, waiting for their turn.  She figured they must be hungry, and with all the tourists who flood the beach in the summer season, they must have worked out that humans have food.

Terra got out her camera and shot about fifty photos- snaps of the beach, snaps of the deserted buildings, snaps of the cats.  But as she progressed up the shore the cats became so numerous that even the shots which were supposed to be  of the water featured cats, trotting along on the sand.  It seemed like the further up the beach she went, the more dense the cat population became.  It was curious to say the least.  She loved cats, but where were they all coming from?

After yet another time check, Terra decided to sit down on one of the concrete benches.  A grey striped tabby joined her and was soon settling down in her lap.  Terra welcomed him with a scratch on the head as she unzipped her bag and dug out her phone.  She called Mehmet at work; while the phone was ringing she could feel another soft, furry tail swishing around her ankles.  These cats were unbelievable.

Even though they'd been together for three years, hearing Mehmet's voice on the phone still never failed to make Terra happy.  He was always cheery and glad to hear from her.  This was especially helpful at the moment— she'd had an eerie feeling about today ever since she'd stepped out onto the beach walkway.  They talked for a few minutes, mostly about the bus trip and the cats, and then Mehmet had to get back to work.  He was the boss, after all, and that made him the busiest person in the office.  Terra, on the other hand, was about to be as un-busy as it was possible for a person to be.

She removed the tabby from her lap, slung bags over shoulders once again, and continued her slow stroll up the beach.  Cats darted across the walkway here and there; some lounged under trees while others huddled in doorways.  Terra lost herself in her thoughts— thoughts of Mehmet, thoughts of this coming challenge, thoughts of two weeks subsisting on vegetarian food.  As she walked she lost track of how long she'd been ignoring her surroundings —perhaps a quarter of an hour passed as she lived inside her own head— but what snapped her back into the real world was a sudden realisation that she hadn't seen a cat for a while, maybe several minutes.  She stopped, looked around, and finally turned to face the direction from where she'd just come.

And there they were, behind her— cats forming a eerily straight line across the walkway.  They were quite some distance back, maybe twenty feet, and they sat on the ground swishing their tails and staring directly at her.  Terra's heart thumped in her chest.  What on earth was going on here?  Even the very presence of so many cats in one place was strange, but this, this was beyond anything Terra had ever experienced.  It was like there was an invisible barrier across the walkway that the cats couldn't cross.  One of the kittens extended a paw out as if to test the border, but then thought better of it.  Terra walked up within a few feet of the imaginary line and squatted down, making kissing noises and patting the ground to invite the cats to join her.  None accepted the invitation.  Their eyes unnerved her, and she stood up and turned away again.

As her gaze passed over the buildings and back toward the direction she'd been walking, a red sign caught her attention.  She read the sign several times but didn't quite believe what it said, baffled because she didn't think she had  walked far enough to be already at this point.  She retrieved the map from her pocket and turned it over to look at the writing she'd scribbled on the back.  She double-checked what she'd written against what was printed on the red sign.  Sure enough, here it was: the Rio Hotel.  Terra had arrived.

This was it, this was the decision from which there would be no return.  The two friends looked directly into each other's eyes, managing not to squint despite the intense midday sun.  Everyone who was acquainted with them had very strong ideas about who they were and what they were doing.  Everyone was wrong.  As the dust swirled around them in the heavy September afternoon, the friends faced the moment they'd been preparing for, the moment they dreaded, the moment they knew was inevitable.

"You can still change your mind, and I'll go instead," one friend said to the other.

The second friend shook his head.  "No, it has to be me.  You know that."

The first friend shrugged.  "I thought I knew a lot of things," he replied.

"Yeah, me too," the second friend chuckled.  "But this is coming directly from the source.  We'd be stupid to fight it or try to change it."

The wind picked up again, and the two friends stood silently for a moment.  There seemed to be little else to say.

"You'd better get going, that boat's not going to wait for you," the first friend said.

The second friend nodded, and extended his right hand.  The first friend took a deep breath, braced himself, and reached his own hand out to meet his friend's.  Until next time, they thought simultaneously as they felt the strange power course through their joined hands, but they both knew that for them there would be no next time.  No, this had all been a terrible mistake.  They had trusted the old man, and the old man had made an error, either out of greed or a simple misreading of the signs.  But the old man was dead now, and it was useless trying to place blame.  Now it would be left to some future generation, to some unimaginable post-historic wanderers, to solve the mystery these two had unwittingly set out to unravel.  The mystery forced upon them by a confused and misguided old man.

The two friends released their grip on each other, and as the wind kicked up a cloud of dust, the second friend broke into a run and raced eastward as fast as he could, never looking back, never to return to this place again.

A sigh escaped from the first friend's mouth as he saw his friend disappear over the horizon.  It was the last breath he ever took in his life.

Okay, due to popular demand (apparently you guys have a love for bad writing), I'm going to post my 2007 NaNoWriMo here.  I'll upload the first chapter (which I just finished!) now and see how it goes, and we'll take it from there.

Hello and welcome - my real blog is here: melissamaples.com.  Come join me.